The Weaver
by The Mustachioed Cat
Summary: Eight years have passed since the Decimation, since the human Weaver halted the machinations of SEELE and NERV and declared himself an enemy of Mankind. This is closure: Gods are born, as the Weaver ends.
1. One

**The Weaver**

One

**

* * *

**

Shinji walked a few steps behind Asuka and Hikari, absently staring at the distant mountains that hung over the cityscape of Tokyo 3. He was wretchedly mulling over an encounter he had just had with Ayanami.

Earlier that day all three pilots had stayed after school with their class to clean the homeroom. The boys had cleaned the floor, the girls cleaned the chairs and desks.

Rei had been kneeling over the water bucket, wringing out a rag in her hands. The way she had looked then, the water slowly dripping off the cloth, the way the sunlight angled in and bounced off the ground around her - that image had caught Shinji's attention and held it. Then Touji had hit him with a broom and sent him back to work.

Later, after a series of sync tests, Shinji had found himself on an elevator with Rei - alone. He had been trying to talk to her all day, but someone was always around, and he couldn't work up the nerve.

"I'm going to my mother's grave tomorrow," he said. "I'm going to be seeing my father."

Rei's head rose slightly, but she did not respond.

"I was wondering, uh, what should I talk with him about?" Shinji's voice grew more confident.

"How would I know?" the girl asked.

Here Shinji faltered. "Well, I've seen you talking with him happily and" his voice grew low and miserable "I don't know what kind of person he is."

Shinji's eyes fell away from Ayanami's back and he slumped in the corner of the elevator.

"My own father," he muttered.

The elevator counted the passing floors. Shinji straightened as they approached the ground floor, and something occured to him, something that might salvage this pathetic attempt to talk with Ayanami.

"Hey, earlier today, when we were cleaning? I saw you and," here he stumbled - where had he been going with this?

"Well, I saw you with that rag, in front of the window and," what was I thinking then? I was going somewhere with this, right?

"It seemed a lot like a Mom," the words came as a relief, the sentence perfectly articulated what Shinji had felt, though he hadn't understood it at the time.

And then he had to ruin it all by adding "I guess you would make a great housewife, Rei."

Rei slightly turned, and Shinji could see she was blushing.

"...what are you talking about?" the girl asked.

"Hey, what's wrong with Shinji?" Hikari was asking. She only used his first name outside of class. 

"Oh, he has to visit his dead mother tomorrow," Asuka said dismissively. "He's been moping around all day."

Hikari Horaki had met up with Asuka and Shinji just outside Nerv. The two girls were going to eat somewhere, and had "allowed" Shinji to "enjoy the pleasure of their company". Well, Asuka had invited him along, anyway. From what he heard of their conversation, she was going to be going out on a date with someone Hikari's sister knew. Asuka had invited Shinji along so that he could hear this, he recognized that. He had no idea why she would bother. Regardless, he was more worried about meeting with his father the next day, then with the Second Child's date. Actually, he didn't even want to _think_ about Asuka going on a date.

His abortive conversation with Rei, his appointment at the memorial tomorrow, and what he was hearing about this "hunk" a few feet in front of him all finally caught up with Shinji. The shame curdled in his gut, making him feel sick. His appetite, formerly strong enough to supress his fear of the Hikari-Asuka dynamic duo, totally fled from him. He was about to speak up and tell Asuka that he would just be going home, when

Something was watching him. He swerved and saw only an empty, darkening street. When he turned back Asuka and Hikari were looking at him, or behind him. Shinji looked over the hedge next to the road, but beyond that was a steep enbankment. There was no one across the street either - their quest for food had taken them through a series of Evangelion support structures. The lights of traffic twinkled at an intersection a few blocks away, but behind them there was only the minimal lighting afforded to Nerv buildings. The road itself was brightly lit with intermittent streetlights, but everything around that was a suddenly oppressive black.

"This place, suddenly its creepy," Shinji muttered, closing the distance to Asuka and Hikari.

"Should have had Misato drive us, Third!" Asuka declared loudly, as though this were somehow Shinji's fault. "She likes you best, after all." At that, she made a slight gesture to Hikari, which caused the other girl to giggle politely.

Shinji didn't care about Asuka's insults. A loud voice made things less... strange. The three of them started hurrying towards the distant lights.

As they walked, the feeling of strangeness stayed with them. Everything around them suddenly seemed less real. Shinji's hairs stood on end, and suddenly something _was right behind him_. He shrieked and turned to find the same empty street. Breathing hard now, he turned back to the girls, who were some distance away.

"Dammit Ikari!" Asuka yelled, "Don't scare us like-"

Then the words came. Diffuse at first, in the sound of the leaves being blown across the pavement, the wind through the trees that ran across one side of the street:

** ...cross the void so black to blue world-young spins a meager Web with beautiful tepid nature...  
**

Suddenly Shinji was looking at a black space where the girls had been scant moments before. There was no light or pavement, only black. No, not true, the light behind Shinji seemed to shine off what was before him, like polished stone.

"Run, run dammit!" Asuka was screaming - but not in front of him.

Dully, Shinji shifted his gaze to the street and saw Asuka, Hikari in tow, going across and further down the street. She was not looking _exactly_ in his direction, but Hikari was, and the class representative's mouth was open and slack.

The Second Child, the way she had spoken - her voice had a quality to it Shinji had only heard once before. Not sure of herself, not resigned, but afraid. That Angel they had killed in the Pacific, when she had seen it had teeth, she had spoken in that tone. Never since.

Anchored by this tangential observation, the particulars of the _thing _in front of him slowly began to seep into Shinji's brain. It was enormous, so large it blocked his view of the sky or the road ahead, but he could peer around it. A streetlamp that had been previously dark flared on just behind Shinji, and the thing before him was suddenly visible.

Four legs that extended from a rounded segment of the body. These legs had several points of articulation and ended in sharp points, one of which had split the concrete beneath it. From the front of that segment, which was scant inches from Shinji, another segment rose up, towering over him. There were four arms on this segment as well. The bottom pair were folded at the joint between the two segments and ended in a knot of cutting things. The upper pair of arms ended in five-fingered hands that were slowly descending towards Shinji. At the top of that segment there was a smaller protrusion inclined down to him. Eight red points glowed there.

** Gods and gods and powers and Powers... ** the voice hissed in Shinji's mind, **the one-way dance, the inevitable conclusion that end that savage end where all are one such simplicity in synchronicity a thing I must commend you for...  
**

Shinji slowly sank to his knees. His eyes glazed over. It occured to him that someone was screaming, and he wondered who it was. The black arms snaked down and picked him up.

Spider, Shinji thought. A big spider.

He rose in the air and stopped just beneath the eight red eyes of the spider that was just a bit larger then Shinji's sanity. That close, he could see the thing's mouthparts, which churned in black as dark as the rest of the thing.

** oh poor Child so sad yes sad oh my fellow Weaver human Weaver genocide Weaver blue Weaver fate written in dust and celestial and by and for invisible hands yes  
**

Asuka was screaming again. Shinji heard, but could only listen to the thing that called itself Weaver.

** changing and dying like you like Children here and here the exclimation point of perpetual slender deaths thoughts-thick destiny scrummed  
**

The Weaver lifted Shinji up higher, right against its face.

Perhaps it will eat me, Shinji thought mutedly.

The thing regarded the Third Child with its red eyes, then carefully lowered him, upright, to the ground.

** sad young Weaver hatred born of hatred my lovely cliche prophecy of self dark and lightning-dark and red-dark  
**

Then the Weaver shifted its body, the points of its legs slamming deep into the concrete now, so Shinji could see Asuka and Hikari some distance down the street. Asuka was screaming into a cellphone and Hikari appeared to have passed out. The Weaver indicated each girl in turn with one five-fingered hand.

** song here is a song there is a song so beautiful young love-death fractals in the Web like grass like ferns like sub-structure of neurons and gouche of the Torque faded and fated ending the final vision in the dark  
**

One of the Weaver's lower arms, the ones covered is sharp things, was suddenly inches from Shinji's face. The odd organic scissor hissed in motion, with the promise of easily parted flesh.

** a change yes a change to this wonderous web with the soon-end the Weaver the Artist spake to the Weaver the Genocide yes yes nice nice very nice all together in the same device oh u short and i long from the love-suicide  
**

The Weaver's knife-hand flickered out of Shinji's vision, and there was the lightest of pinches at his wrist. Then the Weaver showed Shinji his own right hand in its black one.

Shinji looked down. His left arm ended in a smooth stump. He looked back at the Weaver, who was lazily flaying the flesh from Shinji's hand with both its knife-hands while gesticulating with both five-fingered hands, occasionally pausing to pull off scraps of flesh and throw them in the air, like confetti.

**anychange at anytime is not enough no this this weakness taint an imperfection that makes girls beautiful and kills geo-thurmaturges should the Weaver the Artist a moot question this Weaver serves the quintessence the glamor and glamour and geas Weavers weaving and intersecting now and before the-end the last chance says the outside Weaver to him who lies therein  
**

And then the Weaver slipped back out of reality, its monologue fading into the rustle of leaves, and then finally vanishing.

Shinji looked down at where his hand had been. Then he started screaming.


	2. Two

**The Weaver**

Two

* * *

Doctor Akagi sighed and leaned back so Misato could see the monitor.

"Down eight points. Dammit," the Major cursed, looking from the percentage readout to the video feed of Shinji, floating in the entry-plug.

The Third Child's features were normally tranquil during sync tests, now they were simply neutral, slack.

"If we put him any lower, it breaks down altogether," Maya Ibuki was saying. "And what's more, he is responding to the impetus differently. Actually..."

* * *

Shinji Ikari could not clear his mind. He could not think of waves breaking on the shore or something pastoral, which was what he normally concentrated on during sync tests. Every time he imagined something pleasant, serene, a huge black spider would dance across it, cart wheeling with all eight legs extended across the frame of his inner-vision. So he thought instead of the night before, and of what had happened to him.

An ambulance and two black vans had shown up shortly after the Weaver had left, and Shinji had by then been engaged in an animated conversation with a street lamp. He did not remember doing this, but was told by Misato, who had read the statement given by Asuka. After he had been restrained on a gurney and given something that should have rendered him unconscious, he had turned to an orderly and cheerfully asked her where home was. Then he elaborated that he was looking for three sets of walls, blue-lite and squared within a reasonable arthimetic. A bit off the ground, with wide slates and its own kitchen with three bags of sand and a picture of that girl.

This behavior, the doctors had told Misato, was a result of brain swelling.

The first thing Shinji actually remembered after looking down on the darkened street and seeing the empty space where his hand should have been was standing in line at the hospital cafeteria to get green jello. He knew he was there for green jello, but couldn't remember why. His food tray had already been covered in containers of the stuff, and the serving woman in front of him was giving him an evil look. Shinji had taken a surprised step back, and the tray slipped out of his control and slid off the counter and onto the floor.

He moved to clean up the mess, confused but still apologetic. Then he got a look the his right arm. A Section 2 man, who must have been behind him the whole time, caught Shinji before he completely collapsed. He was taken back to his room in a wheelchair, where a nurse made him swallow some pills. The Section 2 man had called the Major, and said she was coming to visit him soon.

Shinji had waited for Misato to come, staring at his right wrist, then cupping it in his remaining hand and staring at the ceiling. It had been somewhat irritating to find that the thought foremost in his mind was whether or not they would let him continue to pilot Evangelion.

One hour ticked by, then another. A few doctors had come by to ask him some questions, to make sure he was himself again. A nurse came by to take measurements for a prosthetic. The light outside was beginning to fade when the Major finally arrived, with Rei in tow.

The Major questioned Shinji about the night before, and the Third Child had told her about the black thing, and had recited exactly what it had said to him. The Major had taken notes and then told him Asuka's version of what happened. The Second Child had apparently not been able to see Shinji's assailant as well as he had, and described a voice in her head that she could not understand. Hikari had blanked out the entire episode.

At the end of the impromptu interrogation - and it felt like that, though Misato had obviously tried to make him feel comfortable - Shinji had finally asked if he would still be able to pilot Eva with only one hand. The Major had said absolutely. This relieved Shinji a great deal more then he would have thought possible.

As the Major was leaving, she said that he would be held for observation for another twelve hours, then would be allowed to leave. There was a sync test scheduled for an hour after that, and someone from Section 2 would drive him. The Major had hesitated at the foot of his bed, as though debating something, and then had left. Rei stayed.

Shinji really wished the girl had left with Misato. Yesterday's 'housewife' comment hung heavy in his mind.

"I am sorry," the girl had said. "I do not know what to say in this circumstance."

Rei had paused, focusing on nothing.

"I do not understand why Major Katsuragi ordered me to accompany her, either. But I am glad I was able to come."

Then she had left, and Shinji had wondered at her words.

The next twelve hours passed without Shinji sleeping. He found that he was unable to. The words of the Weaver weighed heavily on his mind, and would not give him any peace at all.

In the entry plug, Shinji wondered what Touji and Kensuke would make of him. He could handle teasing from them, but he supposed he would not be able to do most of the recreational stuff nearly as well. He was beginning to actually feel tired, and wished the test would end so he could go back to the apartment and maybe actually get some sleep.

* * *

After the sync test, on the way up to the control booth, Shinji kept his right arm behind him, sickened at the way the glove just hung limply.

"No need to hide it, Third," Asuka remarked, leaning against the elevator cage. "We all know its there. Seeing you trying to hide it just reminds us."

The redhead glared at him until Shinji showed her his right arm.

"It isn't really a big deal you know. Once your sync rate gets as high as mine you won't even need the controls!" here Asuka made a motion, imploring to the heavens. "So we'll just have to hope and pray your score can jump twenty points before another Angel attacks."

Shinji was pretty sure this was Asuka acting nice. Even after their synchronicity training together, it was sometimes hard to tell.

* * *

"You all did very well," Doctor Akagi was saying. "Rei, your score was up eight tenths of a point from last time, very good. Asuka, you averaged within three points of your optimum. Concentrate harder next time, you eclipsed your old score at several points in the test."

Then the blonde scientist turned to Shinji, and he was suddenly afraid of what she was going to say.

"Shinji, it appeared that you had dropped seven points..."

Shinji clenched his fist. Here it came...

"But then we wiped your old data and re-established your baseline reading, while at the same time... nevermind, the important thing is your score hasn't been noticeably altered."

Misato came up behind the Doctor, grinning.

"Actually, Shin-chan, your score went up three points," the Major announced.

Ritsuko glared at the Major. "We only had a twenty-minute sample, that is not indicative..."

"Yep, three points up," Misato interrupted, walking past the scientist. "So, I figure I should take you out to dinner to celebrate."

* * *

Much later, Shinji finally fell into his bed, exhausted. The Weaver-words were distant now, and it seemed he would finally be free to rest. Dinner had been something of an event. They had gone to the same ramen shop Misato had treated the Children to previously, after they had caught and destroyed that one falling Angel. Shinji had wolfed down two bowls of ramen with a fork - he could not use chopsticks with his left hand yet. When not eating, Asuka was loudly complaining that she had been forced to cancel her date because of Shinji's "little mishap".

This particular complaint seemed genuine, unlike her performance in the elevator, which Shinji suspected Misato had staged.

Rei had ate quietly, and from time to time glanced in Shinji's direction. When Misato left to get the car and Asuka went to the restroom, the First Child had asked Shinji a question.

"Why do you only talk to me when no one is around?" She asked.

"It was just that one time," Shinji said, somewhat caught off guard by the question. "I was embarrassed to have to ask you about my father."

As he said this, it occurred to him that he hadn't heard anything from his father at all. This was not really a surprise.

"Sometimes I just get... nervous about talking to people," the boy finished lamely.

"I see," Rei was saying. "I thought it had something to do with me being a good housewife."

Shinji bit down on his fork. He had thought that line of discussion over and done with.

"Nuh, no," Shinji laughed nervously. "It was just something I said... I... it was just an observation."

"Jeez Ikari," Asuka's voice came from behind him where, Shinji suspected, she had heard everything. "Propositioning First? You sure you aren't still nuts? There's a lamp post right over there, if you're feeling lonely."

At least dinner had taken his mind off his missing hand.

In bed, in the dark, Shinji massaged the stump, and tried not to feel sorry for himself. He could still pilot Eva, that was what mattered.

And why, exactly, did that matter to him? Shinji had thought that he was piloting reluctantly. But if they did decide he couldn't pilot anymore, his father would probably send him away - he would have to go back to that quiet house and live with his teacher.

He wanted to stay in Tokyo 3. He wanted to keep going to school with his friends. He wanted to stay in the apartment, even if Asuka made things difficult from time to time. This place was his home, and it was the first one he could remember having.

Shinji curled around his maimed arm, and went to sleep.

** grand dreams fly and flee I afear 'tis time to rise and sing the song of yours and mine and ours yes  
**

The Weaver's glowing red eyes were pressed against Shinji's face, and he could feel the strange texture of its skin - hard and smooth like moulded glass.

**to see to spake and change with rote your route a beautiful thing glimmering upon the web forming a new branch **

Shinji jerked back and tumbled out of the bed.

Please let this be a dream, he begged.

The Weaver's eyes followed him, and it pinned him against one wall with its head.

**so strange and quick for a blue-human to surge past knowledge and form a chymical change so rare so quaint  
**

The lights came on. Shinji saw the Weaver's five-fingered hand at the switch.

**I only dance now here and back there in the three-quadrant of the Web history-resonating and thoughts-slim changing ever changing **

It was suspended upside down, hanging impossibly from the florescent light fixture on the wall. One leg hooked around the light, the others were folded above the body.

**your symphony does not diminish the Web still echoes up and down with nauscent perfection this Weaver is so fascinated to behold a self-correcting Web a Web-born Weaver such times and trials are magnificent and beyond beyond beyond  
**

The Weaver was caressing Shinji's cheek with one of its knife hands. Shinji froze as the flat of the many blades on the thing's hand brushed harmlessly up and down his cheek.

**a change a change anytime at anywhen ** the creature said, waving its other knife hand in front of Shinji's face and scissoring it open and closed. **to choose that change this gentle thread  
**

Then the Weaver let go of the light fixture and fell through Shinji, vanishing into the floor. The boy waited a heartbeat as the thing's monologue faded away, then rushed to the bathroom to vomit. Then, because he could still smell the strange scent of the thing clinging to him, he took a shower.

Misato woke up around five and told Shinji to turn down the television. The Third Child, now on the manic edge of sleep deprivation, nearly jumped off the couch at the sound of another human voice. Fumbling with the remote control, he turned down the volume, then sank down into the bedding he had lain out. Feet padded over from Misato's door, and the Major peered over the top of the couch.

"No chance of you sleeping last night, huh?" she asked.

Shinji shook his head. No chance at all.

"Are you..." the woman paused. "Stupid question, I know, but are you okay?"

"I mean," she hurriedly continued, "is it that... thing keeping you up, or this?" she gestured to Shinji's stump.

Shinji shook his head, not really trusting himself to speak.

Then Misato hugged him. Her arms snaked down around his head, and she pulled him up and hugged him.

"We're all still here Shinji," she murmured to him. "We are all here because we want to be. Remember that, okay?"

Shinji squeezed Misato's arm, the only thing he trusted himself to do at the moment.

They stayed like that for a moment, then the moment ended. Misato padded back to her room.

Shinji turned off the television set and thought for a while.

The Weaver-thing had come for him a second time. No one else had seen it. If he told anyone, what would they think? The Weaver terrified him, but he did not think it wanted to kill him. What it had said in his room he had nearly understood. Now, with the haze of sleep deprivation somewhat lifted, he examined the Weaver-words carefully.

It was... _happy _ with what he was doing. When it had taken his hand, it had talked about a change, making a change because of something that had not happened yet. Maybe... that was it. The Weaver had made a change and was happy with it. The idea that he had satisfied the terrible thing made his wound no less grievous, but it did give him the courage to return to his room and go to sleep.


	3. Three

**The Weaver**

Three

* * *

Shinji woke up at around three in the afternoon. He woke up without being yanked out of bed or whispered to by giant spiders. Everything seemed fine until he looked down and saw what he was wearing. After noting this, he stared up at the ceiling for a while, and absently drew a white-gloved finger across his face. It came away smudged with red and white compact. The Third Child got up, checked the hallway to make sure Asuka had not stayed home from school, and waddled into the laundry room. 

A clown. He was wearing a baggy, white, single piece of clothing. Five red poofballs adorned his lower and upper chest in a row. His collar was frilly and extended over the length of his shoulders, splitting in an inverted V in the front so as to not cover up the red poofball there. The same frills extended from the end of either sleeve. His face had been painted with a permanent red frown, and two painted tears ran down each cheek. His hair had been swooped up and made a deep red, the same shade as the red makeup on his face.

Shinji stared at the mirror, and then at the ground, where he found two pairs of comically oversized, black and white checkered shoes.

There was no zipper, so he went into the kitchen and got a pair of scissors. Pen-Pen emerged from his fridge briefly, then made a hasty retreat. Shinji sat on the couch and cut upwards, starting at the right wrist and cutting up to the neck. He repeated the process on his left side, with a bit more difficulty because the cloth was tight around the wrist, and he couldn't slide it off the hand as he could the stump where his right arm ended. Stripping the the waist he found that his nightshirt had been removed. It did not appear he was wearing shorts or underwear, either.

The Third Child carefully removed the oversized shoes, and slid out of the clown outfit completely. He stood in the living room, naked, and the compact on his face began to run. He quickly gathered up the clothing and rushed back to the laundry room, and then in to the bathroom, where he locked the door and turned on the bath faucet and the sink. Then he sat on the bathing stool, and sobbed.

It wasn't really crying, but more a series of jerks and contortions. He pulled at his swooped-up hair, feeling the grease in it come off in his hands. He clawed his face, and the compact gathered under his fingernails. Droplets of white and pink rained down on his folded arms and legs.

After a few minutes, when his body felt like it was under control again, Shinji got up and turned off the sink. He stayed at the front of the bathroom for a moment, listening for any sign that Misato or Asuka had returned. He heard nothing. He went to the bath and removed the faucet, sliding it into a groove in the wall so it could act as a shower and turning the water to its hottest setting.

As the hot water sprayed the room, spilling over the half-filled tub and onto the tile, the white and red makeup began to slough off in the thickening air. Shinji had taken a pocket mirror from the bathroom medicine cabinet and watched as the steam coming off the scalding-hot water clung to his face, grouping in large splotched, and then dripping down and off his chin. This transfixed him until his face became merely wet, the white and pink running down his chest. He hung the mirror on the shower faucet and then forced himself under the hot water.

Soon his hair was matted against his skull, the rinsed dye turning the water in the tub a deep red. Drops of red splashed across the room like blood spray. The pink of his face re-emerged.

As this happened, as his real face was revealed, as his hair slowly became brown again, Shinji's body stopped shaking. His tears, which had long stopped flowing, became another shameful memory.

It was like being on the battlefield, except he wasn't. This sort of emotion growing inside him, this surge of adrenaline that he had only felt before in Eva, and once, when he had met his father that first time before Unit One... it was something he was unaccustomed to. But it felt summoned, it felt controlled, and slowly Shinji found himself in the grips of real rage.

This Weaver thing, he knew what it was saying. There had been a lot of sadness in his life, and the Weaver found this... hilarious? entertaining?

Shinji thought about his time in the mountains, when he had run away from Misato. He thought about sitting next to steep cliffs and thinking horrible thoughts. He was beyond that now, he had recognized that even before Asuka had come into his life, but he did not think it was funny. What else? Sadness from injury, sadness from isolation? from rejection? from shame?

Enough of the red paint was out of his hair, so he lathered it up with shampoo. Then he turned around and settled under the water so it could get the paint off the back of his neck.

Should he tell the others now? Now that it seemed the thing wasn't going to leave him alone? They would think he was crazy, at least at first. Rei would probably believe him, but he was still nervous about talking to her, worried that she would mention it to someone because it would never occur to her to keep a secret, and then Shinji would _really_ look crazy. He couldn't tell anyone. He was being toyed with by this crazy spider-thing, and he couldn't breath a word of it to anyone. Shinji was starting to doubt they could do anything to help him, anyway.

His rage abated, and for a moment it seemed bleak depression would set in. The situation seemed hopeless, if not dire. This thing was really going to really drive him crazy. Shinji did not know how he was supposed to sleep again.

Somewhere deep in the apartment, a phone rang.

* * *

He could only sit in the entry plug of Unit One and watch Rei and Asuka engage the Angel. The Commander had put the Third Child's pilot status on hold until an investigation of the incident that had taken his hand was complete. Apparently Doctor Akagi thought mental contamination by Unit One was the cause. Shinji could not understand this rationale at all, but he was still drained and had only protested half-heartedly. Apparently Misato had done most of the protesting for him. 

From shower to entry plug, thirty minutes had elapsed. Shinji had barely toweled off before Section 2 was knocking on the door. He had been whisked to Nerv and in his plugsuit before anyone told him he was on permanent standby.

Shinji sat and watched Units Zero and Two manuver closer to the target, a larger black-and-white sphere hovering among some of the taller buildings. On impulse, he activated a comm channel to Rei and Asuka, and wished them good luck. He cut the channel before either could respond.

Running away still. He wondered at his sudden cowardice. He almost wished Asuka would reopen the channel and tell him to shut up. Anything was better then watching from the tactical display as the two drew closer and closer to the Angel.

And then everything went to hell.

Comm channels blinked open. Asuka was screaming something about a shadow, and the Major was yelling at the two pilots to get to higher ground. Rei came on, telling Pilot Sohryu to take her hand.

Shinji pulled the trigger on his left control handle. This should have initiated the synchronization sequence. Instead, a display window bigger then the comm channel windows came up and informed him that "Activation is Unauthorized". Shinji screamed something and hit the side of the entry plug, his fist bouncing off with little effect.

Asuka was now reporting, in an amazingly cool tone, that the shadow appeared to be pulling her down, despite her efforts to scale a building. It was only right before her signal cut out that Shinji heard that tone in her voice, the one he had heard beneath the Pacific, and the night the Weaver had taken him. He heard real fear.

Rei was reporting that Unit Two was completely submerged within the shadow when the first webbing drifted across Shinji's peripheral vision. The boy spun, and found only the wall of the entry plug. Doctor Akagi was reporting that all response from Unit Two's entry plug had cut off, and Shinji sat still and observed, as well as he could, the weird, weaving cilia that seemed to be drifting just outside his vision. When he turned to look at it full on, there was nothing there, but when he stared straight ahead... always in that one spot, something festered.

This is it, the Third Child thought. I've finally snapped.

* * *

He was chewed out for trying to start up the Evangelion without orders. Doctor Akagi and his father told him that his status was already in jeopardy, that if he ever disobeyed an order to stay put again, or even try to, that he would be sent away. Until his pilot status was reinstated, he would not be allowed near Unit One. 

Shinji looked at the doctor, at his father. Around him people were orchestrating a rescue operation, and these two were talking about something that seemed so little, so small. An apology, a desperate apology, floated through his mind. His father had complimented him during the Tenth Angel incident, he had felt a connection to the man then, but now... he simply said "Yes", and left.

Misato had come after him, and asked him if he wanted to come to where they were setting up the staging area.

"We will get her back," the Major assured him, trying to hold eye contact "we're going to beat this thing. You should come with me, you could talk to Rei."

Shinji shook his head, but asked where the staging area was. He might go there a bit later. From the sound of things in Central Dogma, whatever Nerv was planning would take some time to come together.

The Third Child left the Nerv complex, and walked down the mostly-empty streets. The evacuation was still in effect, and only the occasional military vehicle passed by. Each slowed when they saw him, but apparently recognized him and did not stop. This confused Shinji until he realized he had neglected to take off his plugsuit. Of course they weren't going to stop an Eva pilot.

As he walked, he saw things here and there that weren't here or there when he looked at them full on. He was starting to do more then see them, too. Subtle changes in the air and a particular smell accompanied each strange not-sighting. The spots grew on cars, benchs, and seemed to blow down the street against the curb.

He eventually came to the shadow. It was black in depth and circular in unnatural ways. On the other side of this black lake, Shinji could see an Evangelion power cable slowly being sucked down. Some distance to the left was Unit Zero, kneeling down, entry plug ejected.

**blue and green and orange oh yes but black so black this I find strange maths and dimensions deeper here and**

Shinji turned around.

**I see my lovely dandy-clown mourning his fallen such harmony and skill my Web**

He didn't think, he simply threw himself at the thing which had appeared behind him, and now danced from side to side. He grabbed the edge of one of its mouthparts, one that never actually descended into that churning black maw of a mouth, and wildly jabbed at the thing's eyes with his right arm. But the eyes were like the rest of the creature, hard as stone, with a unnaturally smooth texture. So smooth that Shinji's hand slipped off the dangling mouthpart and sent him tumbling into the Weavers arms, and suddenly

**_the sky melts away and stays there there is blue but also depth insane depth and between and within that depth and other deep spaces there are the threads the things he once saw in the corner of his vision what he sensed intuitively the Web the Weaver talked about everywhere from his fear that branched and spiked out and there were the ghosts of past selves and others to the stars moving and invisible in the daysky and the great gulfs of space between here and there bound together so close neat bundles of ropey emotion and magnetism and light thoughts-thick_**

and then Shinji tumbled out of the thing's grasp, onto oddly yielding gravel. The Third Child screamed in a beastial way and threw his head back, tearing clumps out of his hair and trying to purge those terrible, complex and utterly objective images from his mind.

**you saw the Weave I saw so strange yes a bobbin Weaver**

"What wasz thaa" Shinji gasped, each word a moan.

**your world my world where I can crawl from emotion to movement to probability where blue and black and deepblack meet and bleed and are cut and sewn into such wonderful splendid tragedy**

The webbing - the Weave - Shinji could see it now. He saw it everywhere he looked! It was not the deep and complex weave of the Web that made up the Weaver's world, but its detrius, extensions into the normal expression of reality. The fact that he suddenly knew that illicted another sob.

Its killing me, he thought. This thing is going to burn me down to nothing.

And that thought was what finally calmed him down.

I am not nothing, he thought with a grim expression on his face. And I am _not a clown_!

Slowly the shaking stopped. Slowly, Shinji rose. He walked over to the edge of the roof and looked twenty stories down, to the black lake that had swallowed Asuka. He was on the same side of the lake as Unit Zero now. He watched as the power cable that had been descending into that darkness was wheeled back in. He saw the frayed end where an Eva was supposed to be.

And he saw the Weave that stuck to the world, against the people operating the cable retrieval system, blowing down the street... and clinging to him.

He tore the scintillating stuff from his body, and suddenly felt much better. He looked at the Weave that was slowly vanishing in his hand. Despair, he realized.

Shinji turned again to the Weaver, who was dismantling with great interest what appeared to be an engine block. A brown car lay next to the spider, in pieces.

**necrophagic how romantic to run on ancient blood** the thing crooned to itself.

"What do you want with me?" Shinji finally found his voice.

The spider looked up as one blade-hand flashed forward and bisected the engine.

**a small favor between thee and thine I thought such a lovely vector**

"A favor? What vector!" Shinji was finding it much easier to follow the Weaver now.

**your friendgirl the one you think about at night inside your head and outside in spurts perhaps**

Here, Shinji reddened.

**that lovely black thing with lines of absolute stark reality the thing I coaxed into being so droll and dumb as**

"You did this? You brought that here?" Shinji gestured down to the blackness that had swallowed Asuka.

**came before and before the stars were right I weaved a marvelous wave of space that flowed around it just outside the outside where it slept and waited and dreamed its simple carnal delights**

"Well, can you make it go away? Can you..."  
Shinji could not believe he was even thinking this.

"...can you bring Asuka back?"

At this the Weaver discarded the engine block and with a causal flick of one hand sent the entire car spinning off the edge of the building. Then it came at him.

**Weaver the Genocide wonders at my beautiful work my carefully planned event I admit my cameo but oh so dismayed for this Weaver who can not walk on its own four feet I wonder and ponder what shall happen if this Weaver were to go splatty-wat and cover the ground with that bag of bluewater so foolishly composed a Weaver who wished to die once today shall be resolved**

The Weaver picked Shinji up, and threw him off the building.


	4. Four

**The Weaver**

Four

* * *

At the edge of the thing Doctor Akagi had recently dubbed a "sea of Dirac," the Nerv staging area was brightly lit and empty. Floodlights washed over the cement grounds, the whiteboard covered in esoteric maths and surrounded by chairs, all now vacant. Everyone was inside the tactical command shed, arguing, managing. Rei Ayanami sat alone in the shadow of a crate, away from the floodlights and the endless babble of words she could not and did not need to understand. 

Something was troubling her. There was a particular feeling in her stomach, a tightening. This had begun earlier in the day, about three hours after Pilot Sohyru had been swallowed up by the Angel. Rei had inquired to Doctor Akagi about this strange feeling, and had been told briskly that perhaps she was experience pre-menstrual cramps. She had been ordered to the medical transport, where she had received three pills the color of blood. Swallowing these pills had no effect on the feeling in stomach.

She found herself moving her hands for want of something to do. She very much wished to speak with Pilot Ikari about this, he might have some insight into the matter. Rei would have asked Pilot Sohryu even, were that possible.

Shinji... her mind seized on his name suddenly, and again her stomach tightened.

* * *

"The UN and JSSDF can only muster forty-five aircraft that meet the minimum specifications for N2 deployment, ma'am," Shigeru was saying. "It will take them at least three hours to muster the additional eighty aircraft - probably from the United States and Australia - with another two to outfit them for deployment." 

Misato leaned over the Logistics Officer's shoulder, saw him hide something on his workstation.  
"Don't let them know we're snooping around, Lieutenant," she cautioned. "We've already got those ground troops in place to 'support' us."

Shigeru nodded, then continued to coordinate the evacuation of shelters too close to the blast zone, and maybe do a little packet-sniffing on the side.

The Major stepped outside the tactical operations center for a breather. The air in there was cool and damp. Everyone was really working their asses off to make this happen, and for the most part all Misato could do was watch.

She walked the length of the concrete observation deck of the building Nerv had co-opted. Five hours en-route, setting up, discussing options, and then the request to the UN. Misato was certain the Commander would not review her handling of this situation favorably. He had given her autonomy, though he was still in the Geo-Front - the Major was certain she was not performing to his expectations. It had just taken too long to make everything come together.

"Major Katsuragi," a quiet voice came from behind her.

"Hey Rei," Misato turned, addressing the girl, attempting to dismiss the formality in the girl's voice.

"Where is Pilot Ikari, Major?"

Misato sighed. That had been bothering her as well. He was not at home, and he didn't have his cell phone. She had expected him to show up by now. In another hour, she would have to call Section 2 and get them to bring him in - he couldn't be too close to the sea of Dirac when their plan went into motion. That Rei had asked after him would have been cute at any other time.

"I don't know, Rei. Are you prepared for the mission?" the Major tried to change the subject.

"Wait at the perimeter of target, spread AT Field to full. Yes Ma'am."

"Good, good."

The First Child walked up from behind the Major and leaned with her against the railing.

"Ma'am, what does it mean when your stomach tightens at a thought, or image?" the girl asked, her voice barely a whisper now.

"Well," Misato began, caught way off guard. "I guess it depends on the thought."

"Pilot Ikari," the girl replied. "It has recently developed that whenever I think about him, my stomach constricts and I am in a small amount of pain."

"Um... what do you think about Sh-Pilot Ikari?" Misato, despite the dire situation, found this conversation intriguing.

"He is my comrade. He is a Pilot. He speaks to me for reasons other then to issue an order. He has seen me naked, which I have been told by a girl at school I should attach some significance to. He has stated that he thought I would make a good housewife. These..."

"Wait, what did..." the Major stopped. No need, she had heard it the first time. "What do you mean, he... never mind, I can't deal with this right now. Just..." she closed her eyes, felt a headache coming on. "Can you think of a reason why you'd be getting... uh... cramps, whenever you think about him?"  
"In addition to my stomach tightening up, I also shed tears," the blue-haired girl said.

Misato's own stomach tightened. She did not need this shit right now, but couldn't very well ignore it.

"Did Shinji... hurt you? Did he... do something to you?" the Major asked, now facing Rei, making eye contact.

"He once fell on me by accident. Other then that, no Major."

"Then why would you... I mean, the memory upsets you, that is why you are crying, right?"

The First Child appeared to ponder this. The Major was going to re-ask the question when she finally answered.

"I believe I now know. Several hours ago, when this feeling began, I became aware of a certain wrongness in the world. Something felt wrong to me, in a way I do not think you can understand. Now that I consider my actions and my memory of Pilot Ikari, I think he must be dead."

The Major stared at the girl, not understanding. When comprehension came, she kept staring. As she watched, several tears slid down Rei's impassive face.

* * *

The train yard was dark and misty. A woman stood in the exact center of a roundtable, staring off into the black distance. 

Suddenly, she was not alone. Another presence slid into existence beside her, stepping forward from nothing as though walking through an open doorway.

The intruder's features were garbled, indistinct. It was wrapped in darkness, and appeared to spin around crazily for a time.

"Strange place, dark place," the intruder commented in a flat voice as it completed a circuit around the still woman. "Memory mixing cognitive lacks, diffuse, diffuse."

The intruder stopped in front of the woman, whose own features were still as stone.

"Mind and memory and this strange husk. Became a place and become a place, inefficient. A puzzle put together wrong, here, your immortal thought."

The intruder reached out and touched the woman, and the whole world shook.

"A husk yes. A name? The subtext is here, in the gravel, in the rails. You then were who? Here I see a daughter..." the intruder gestured to a particular cross-tie on a particular track nearby, "there I see a husband. Here I see one of those emotion-things, so you were human? A name, a name..."

The intruder paced down the length of the track, then back again.

"I see white walls," it muttered. "I see monstrosity. I see ego. I see more of that emotion-thing. No name. Got no name."

The intruder returned to the still woman. "So then a lock without key, the movement there the twisty-turn being your self. But the lock is so particular, a key can only take so many forms I wonder is your name Kei? Katsui? Kana? Kyoto? Kami?"

In the still of this strange scene, the intruder continued to try and guess the woman's name.

* * *

I never thought sleep could be so exhausting, Asuka thought. 

The amber light and the seams in the walls of the entry plug, once attending to her greatness, the feel of power and happiness whenever she got into Eva and activated it, those things had become oppressive in their sameness. Asuka couldn't stand to look at the inside of the entry plug anymore.

"This is stupid," the girl muttered to no one. "I'm the best they have, I have the best synch rate. They can't afford to lose me, so why haven't they come for me yet?"

She pressed a button in the right control handle. Scintillating light filled the entry plug, and she was again faced with a wall of white. Radar picked up nothing, external atmospheric sensors gave readings too various and extreme to be real. Asuka deactivated the view screen, noting absently that the clock indicating remaining life-support had jumped forward eight minutes.

"Can't die like this," she muttered, closing her eyes.

Around her, motes of white began to appear in the LCL.

* * *

There was that door again. That same god damn door, and there she was, pushing it open, so happy. 

Mommy, mommy! she had cried. I'm a real e-leet pilot now, just like you!

You can love me now, right mama? You don't need that doll anymore.

Look at me mama, I'm the one like you. I'm the one that loves you best!

The door opened, and there was that doll, that hated doll. It was suspended from the ceiling by a rope, which was fastened around its neck. Next to the doll...

_The only thing I can remember about her, back before her accident, was that she would read me bedtime stories. I don't even remember her voice, just the way her body curled around mine, holding me. That was where I was happy - with her. She read me "Goodnight Moon", and I remember making-like I was reading ahead of her, though I was just trying to recite it from memory. 'Goo nigh cow jump ova moo!' I would pretend-recite, drawing my finger carefully over the wrong line. And she would just laugh and hold me close, and her warmth, she was my whole world._

...her mother was next to the doll. She was standing on a chair, balancing on shaking, shrunken legs.

_I remember that, her reading to me, because I managed to grasp what happened quickly. That first day I have gone to see her in the hospital, and she hadn't recognized me, the doctors said it was the medication. They said she would be back to normal soon. But when I saw the way her eyes looked ahead and stared through me, the way her hands grasped at nothing, I knew mother was hurt bad, that her eyes might never focus on me again. So I held on to that image of her reading me bedtime stories, because if I didn't make a conscious decision to remember, that memory would be forgotten. I wrote it down, I used to re-read my childish scrawl, but I don't anymore. That memory could not become my mother, and the empty thing that looked like her I could only attend to and pray for something to change. Then someone gave her that god damn doll._

Mama? Mama, I'm a pilot now, they told me today! Nana picked me up from school and

Mama? What are you doing?

_In the face of such wrongness, it took me too long to understand. By the time meaning came to me, the rope was around her neck._

Please... no mama! Don't go! Don't go!

Stay with me mama, I'm begging you, look at me!

Then, die with me, Asuka, the thing that had once been my mother said.

_I saw her die. I saw the thing she had become wiggle on the end of that rope like a worm. That was when I knew she wasn't my mama. Mamas don't make their children die. Mamas didn't make my tummy hurt they way she did, every time I saw her. Mamas hold me close and make me feel safe, and read me Goodnight Moon.

* * *

_Asuka opened her eyes. The LCL was getting cloudy, and there was a metallic odor in the air. Blood.

The Second Child put a hand to her mouth and suppressed the urge to vomit. When the feeling in her chest had gone away, she took one nasty breath of LCL, then held it. It should last her five minutes, at least.

There was a red light blinking at the wrist of her plug suit. Less then two hours before it would stop heating her. The LCL was already cold on her face.

"Those idiots, they better hurry," she muttered. "Stupid Wondergirl, stupid Shinji. Stupid Misato. Why are you making me wait?"

She had one hour of life-support left.

She closed her eyes. For only a moment.

* * *

The air was thick like bacon grease. She opened her eyes, and couldn't see the walls of the entry plug, the LCL was too thick with ropey white strands. Asuka gagged at the taste and smell of the stuff. Scaberous, white-blood. She choked on it. 

Taking in a mouthful of the now-vile stuff, Asuka kicked off the pilot seat and towards the top of the entry plug. Here the LCL was somewhat cleaner. She ducked down long enough to see the life support clock displayed on the top of the left control handle.

Five minutes.

She was dead.

Even if they pulled her out right now, there wouldn't be enough time to unseat the entry plug. Even if she used the emergency eject, it would take at least four minutes to hit the ground.

Dead.

She was dead.

* * *

"Unae? Uaeda? Ueada?" the intruder continued its guessing before the silent woman. "Yune? Yone? Yane?" it chanted, disappearing briefly, only to reappear in another position around the woman. "Keep on coming back to the ko phonetic, should. Wonder, wonder am I looking for a name? Identity the crux - image of self. You came here thinking of this, thinking of that..." 

The air in the scene changed. The intruder was given pause.

One moment by her side, the next perched on the woman's head, the intruder scoured the dark for whatever had changed, because it was old-fashioned like that - sick at looking at the world laid objective.

There was something out there, just beyond that thing that looked like an overpass. The intruder scampered down and edged forward, first in the shadows of cross-ties, then in the darkness beneath the overpass. There was a person out there. A real person. A woman, or younger, hard to remember the now suddenly.

The girl-thing appeared to be trying to approach the still-woman. Unfortunetly, she had no place in the image, could not understand the principles involved. The chasms of distance present in this place were absolute, if one could not remove oneself from the image.

The girl did make some progress, which surprised the intruder and caused it to reveal itself, dancing around her.

"My my a full thing here, yes. Here you are why are you here? A person, a place, a distant relation yes? You moved, you moved."

The girl did not appear to see him, her gaze fixed on the distant figure of the still-woman.

"That thing that one, that little stone avatar - know it yeah?" the intruder prompted again, rather used to having its questions go unanswered.

Kaji, the girl breathed, words stilled in the air. Kaji, help me!

The intruder landed in front of the girl, who was now making no progress at all.

"Secret," the intruder explained. "Here? I am? Don't know why. Compelled to come, compelled to stay. Strange that, right? Compelled also to do this."

The intruder's indistinct clothing billowed open and wrapped around the girl. A soft hand covered her eyes.

When the hand came away, the girl stood before the still-woman.

"Strange thing, here. Mind is sorta, sorta not. Key that turns, ya know? A name, I got her name I think. Been wondering if I should say it or just play my guessing-games."

The girl gained sudden awareness. She focused on the intruder, then the still-woman.

"Name reverberates just so, see? Kyoko Sohryu."

Nothing happened, nothing changed.

"Damn and all, gotta be the owner of that memory. Got to be the aspect, the identification of oneself at inception, see? Pastoral scene, you picture it why? Where are you in the shot?" the intruder pointed at the still-woman, "here. Your name is Kyokosohryu and but it is not."

The girl was trying to approach the woman. The intruder gently pushed her forward.

The girl moved in close, touched the woman, felt her skin, her warmth. Then she cried out and embraced the still-woman, and spoke

Mama.

* * *

Forces gathered at the edge of the sea of Dirac, Unit Zero at the very edge. Ninety-five contrails lanced through the sky, completing one final pass before execution commencing their bombing run. 

Ritsuko Akagi observed the mission's locus through binoculars, the staging area having been moved back two miles. No good to be right next to 992 N2 detonations.

She stood on a small balcony, much smaller then the observation deck at the previous location. She was smoking a cigarette, binoculars in one hand, PDA with feedback of mission progress in her other. She had left the command shed, wanting to try and forget the way Misato had sounded when they had shown her the Third Child's body.

Ritsuko had gotten a good view of it, and that was enough. No face, broken everything, only way you could tell it was him was by the plugsuit.

They had found him in the street, near the shadow. It looked like he had jumped off one of the twenty-story jobs that dotted the commercial district. Ritsuko had no idea what had pushed the Third Child to suicide, but then again, she wasn't his guardian. Misato had left with the quiet ambulance, quite clearly in shock. The Commander had transferred the Major's responsibilities to Ritsuko.

Destroying the Angel was their ultimate goal now. Even if Asuka had stayed on life-support the entire time, chances were equally as good that she was dead - Ritsuko had never liked the loud girl, but this particular fact gave her no satisfaction. The Commander had sent her a message that Unit Two and its pilot were to be considered a secondary concern, destroying the Angel was to be Nerv's ultimate goal.

Ritsuko wondered how Gendou was taking his son's death. She wondered if he was capable of mourning at all.

The doctor had moved the schedule up twelve minutes in spite of the Commander's orders. It was theoretically possible for the Second Child to survive for that long, and Ritsuko figured Misato would appreciate it in hindsight, even if it felt like a useless gesture to the doctor.

The ground troops were closing in around the sea of Dirac, planting targeting lasers. Unit Zero stood completely still. Ritsuko wondered, idly, if Rei cared that Shinji was dead. It would be interesting to observe how that thing, totally devoid of frame-of-reference, handled it. Interesting, but morbid.

She was about to put down the binoculars and go back to the command shed when the sea blew apart.

* * *

The two dimensional surface ruptured and heaved. Red light cut through the black deepness, and the black and white thing in the sky shuddered and faded to just black. 

Blood erupted at the top of the sphere, and for just a moment, an enormous hand was visible. Another tear, this time nearly bisecting the creature latitudinally, appeared, a wide fan of blood raining on the broiling ground below.

Hands appeared on either side of the laceration, and it was ripped open wide. Evangelion Unit Two _roared_.

The ground stopped moving at the exact moment that the sphere lost its shape and began falling from the sky. The blood-drenched Evangelion jumped from the descending Angel and landed on the ruptured sea, not falling into it but smashing it apart.

The blackness flickered for a moment, and then the shadow disappeared. The flaccid black shape in the sky continued to fall, and Unit Two stood in the midst of a restored city, covered with blood.


	5. Five

**The Weaver**

Five

* * *

Reiko Mishima worked at the information desk of the Municipal Hospital in Tokyo 3. Five days a week, from six to two, she sat behind the wide Lucite U at the hospital's North entrance. It was her job to give directions to quiet, somber families, a dozen implied tragedies passing before her eyes every day. _Tomiko-chan? Ukeda, right? She is in the burn unit ICU, third wing, second floor. Only one of you can visit. The balloon won't be allowed inside._

She also handled the secretarial work for three junior associates of the hospital.

It was 8:40 on a bright and sunny morning and Naoko, the other girl who worked the day shift with Reiko, had just stepped out for a smoke. A day after the evacuation stand-down, there were almost no patients at the hospital. All invalids had been transferred to smaller regional hospitals well away from the heart of Tokyo 3. The staff calendar showed only three surgeries today. All three of the doctors Reiko worked under were off golfing, or whatever it was they did when Nerv gave them a 'snow day'. But no rest for Reiko, no. The Tokyo 3 Municipal was a public building, and had to be opened at all times, even if only retaining a skeleton staff of which Reiko was always a part.

The entrance doors slid open, and the hospital recieved its first guest of the day. A handsome, if ill-kept man approached the information desk.

"Yo," the man addressed her, leaning way over the narrow ledge of desk. "I'm looking for a woman, name's Katsuragi. Heard she came her last night, hasn't left."

Reiko's eyes darted from her computer to the stubble-faced man. Goddamn it, she cursed to herself. How come the cute ones are always looking for their girlfriends, why couldn't he be visiting his parents?

The computer search returned nothing, Reiko explained this apologetically.

"No problem, sorry, sorry, I don't think she's actually a patient," the man laughed easily. "Maybe you could help me with another name? Asuka Langley Sohryu?"

There was a name Reiko knew right away.

"1st Cranial Nerve," she said, without looking at the computer. "But that's Nerv stuff, if you don't have clearance they won't let you in."

The man laughed again, "oh, that's the least of my worries, I'm afraid." Then he walked around the desk and was gone.

The entrance doors slid open again. Reiko glanced up to see who was coming - another hot one, hopefully - then automatically looked back down.

"Organic retorted, skewed," said a flat voice, and then there was a knocking sound on the Lucite desk. "Easier to see, makes the place swim, really. Clear flesh, who'd have thought."

Reiko heard the voice, and was also completely absorbed with filtering out spam from Dr. Hanataka's inbox.

"Followed the debris-trail here. Got all sorts of stuff laying about though, can't see a thing. Looking, I think, for a dead place. A place where they store dead things?"

"The morgue?" Reiko asked, absently.

"Whatever name, wherever?"

"Downstairs. You can't go... hey!" Reiko looked up suddenly. What had she been saying? There was no one before her. There had been a voice but... no, she must have imagined it.

* * *

Katsuragi was sitting in a bench outside Asuka's room. She was gnawing on her thumb when she noticed Kaji approaching, at whose sight she sat up a little straighter and feigned indifference. 

"Back from Kyoto, I see," the Major greeted him rather coldly. "She's hasn't woken up yet."

Kaji glided past her stiff form and sat down on the bench next to her.

"Got back from Kyoto five days ago, heard you had a little problem, was looking into it for you," the stubble-faced man smiled at her sadly. "I am... well, I don't know what to say to you Katsuragi. I heard about the Third Child, and I couldn't believe it. Still can't."

"Well, you can go down to the morgue if you want, they're keeping him down there until someone can do an autopsy," Misato's reply was bitter and angry.

"I... did not come for Asuka, Misato. You know that." The man produced a disk from his pocket. "This might have come too late, but I found some information for you, about this Weaver thing." He slid the disk across the bench, toward her, then stood and stretched.

"Sorry I wasn't here earlier, I found out about an hour ago. Shinji was pretty well-adjusted for all the shit he'd been subjected to. I think he would have turned out better then us." He passed by Misato, close, but not touching her. "Saying anything else, you'd probably kick my ass. Call me when you have the funeral arranged, huh? Anything I can do, you know I'll do it."

Kaji heard her stand, heard her take a step towards him. He waited for her to say his name, but she never did. He simply shrugged, a hard movement, and kept walking. There was something there, but it was a delicate thing. He hoped, before this entire business was concluded, he would be able to hold her again.

* * *

It was 8:55. Reiko was debating whether or not to make a note of Naoko's continued absence in the day log. That silly girl was always going off on some pretense. Reiko had caught her more then once chatting with her friends on that stupid pink cell phone of hers when the girl should have been working. Once or twice, her friends had even called on the hospital information line. Reiko was sick of filling in for her. 

The entrance doors slide open. Reiko glanced up just in time to make out a large black shape, before she was struck and lifted out of her seat, pieces of Lucite desk and her computer flying around her. She screeched briefly before slamming into the wall. Then she dropped eight feet to the ground, and didn't make much noise at all.

* * *

Keiko Futanabe worked for Nerv, Section 2. Up until yesterday, she and two other agents had been assigned exclusively to the care and protection of the Third Child. Keiko had never met Shinji in person, and doubted he had even known what she looked like, but she had still formed a connection with the charmingly awkward young boy. Here had been someone with the fate of humanity in his hands, who still had trouble talking to girls his own age. Of the three children, he seemed the most human to Keiko - a subtly and not-so-subtly flawed human being. Rei Ayanami was robot, a blank slate that seemed to resist inscription, and Asuka Langley Sohryu was one of those girls Keiko had hated in high-school - the hot-shit, easily popular girl. 

And now she was guarding Shinji Ikari's body, standing just outside the Tokyo 3 Municipal Hospital morgue.

The caretakers always stood down after the Children entered Nerv-proper. Shinji had left after the initial encounter with the Twelth Angel, and in the rush to implement their counter-strategy, no one had noticed the Third Child's plugsuit-signal move off Nerv premises. That was how they had found him, with a tracking device in his plugsuit. Shinji's caretakers had fucked up royal, and now the boy was dead, apparently of suicide.

Keiko didn't buy it. Her function as Shinji's watcher had been as a psychologist, mainly. She had watched the way he positioned himself in school, how far he distanced himself from the other Children. She was the only watcher in Shinji's group that conferred with the other groups on a regular basis - comparing psychological reports, making discrete and sometimes cruel bets about the Children and their various activities, and watching the psychologist assigned to Rei Ayanami twitch. Nothing Keiko had learned from her peers, or her gut feeling, added up to the Third Child's suicide. Her report was on the Commander's desk - she hoped he considered it before bumping her down to cleaning toilets.

The agent was interrupted from her introspection by a sound coming from inside the morgue. She slowly turned to the door. No one was in there. None of the resident morticians had returned from the evacuation yet, that was why Shinji's body hadn't been interred - the Commander had ordered an autopsy. The sound came again, sharper and louder, a clang she recognized.

The first sound had been the lid to the refrigerated cells being thrown open, the second sound had been the slab on which the bodies rested being pulled out.

"S-3 to other watchers, I have an intruder in the morgue," Keiko whispered into her radio.

"Say again?" came a voice fragmented by three levels of concrete.

"S-3 to watchers, someone is inside the morgue. Someone got past me and is in the morgue."

"S-1, go help S-3," the voice had grown irritable. "And remember, they only go down if you shoot them in the head."

"S-1 to S-3, on my way," came a second voice.

Keiko turned off the radio. S-2, the asshole on the radio, had been off-duty when Shinji had gone missing, and was being very vocal in blaming the other two agents for the incident. That cunt only cared about how it would effect his safety record - Shinji was just another job for him. Plus, he had been the one on duty during the now-infamous "Weaver incident", where he and A-3, the psychologist assigned to Asuka Langley Sohryu, had completely failed to prevent the assault on the Third Child. In fact, both had been found in a highly suggestive state of undress a mile down the road by other Section 2 agents during their forensic sweep of the area - though both agents claimed to have been monitoring the Children before suddenly finding themselves naked in the bushes. S-2 was obviously hoping that this screw up by Keiko and S-3 would overshadow his own. Keiko doubted it would end well for him.

S-3, Shojiro Tanaka, like Keiko, had felt a connection with the Third Child. He had been taking it harder then Keiko. Last night she had taken him to dinner while S-2 and A-1 and A-2 were on duty at the hospital.

In a little under five minutes, Shojiro came jogging down the hallway, shirt untucked, hair hastily patted down. He looked really cute like that, Keiko thought.

The male agent looked from Keiko to the door she was leaning against. Inside, there was another loud bang, and then a strange vibration that rattled the door. Both agents un-holstered their service pistols, and gave each other a look. Keiko eased away from the door, and Shojiro slipped his hand into the handle. Then he stopped, pressed his ear to the door, and listened. The deep sound came, and rattled the door again. Shojiro looked at Keiko, confused, and mouthed 'something strange' to her.

Keiko retreated a few meters and turned on her radio.

"S-3 to S-2, something strange down here, need additional support."

There was a pause - S-2 thinking of an excuse, likely. Keiko waited and waited, and no reply was forthcoming. She returned to Shojiro and shrugged, then pantomimed choking the radio. Shojiro grinned nervously, and laced his fingers through the handle again when

"Get out of there!" the radio exploded with noise. Both agents jumped away from the door.

"There's a I don't know what you have to get out of there!" S-2 was screaming, completely hysterical.

He might've been a shitty human being, but Keiko had never figured S-2 for a coward. She and Shojiro backed down the corridor. Whoever was raiding the hospital would have to come from the stairwell, there were no other routes of entry Keiko was aware of.

The two agents continued to back up, first looking behind, then in front of them. The hallway had no furniture, and the only unlocked door had been the morgue. They were completely without cover.

"Fuck-ing thing just went..." Keiko switched the radio off, cutting S-2 off mid-sentence. As the echoes of the radio died away, they were replaced by a heavy crashing sound. Neither agent could tell where it was coming from.

The double doors at the end of the hallway proximate to S-2's position were torn off their hinges, and something pushed its way out of the stairwell. It filled the brightly lit hallway, its black bulk moving awkwardly in the too-tight space, smashing lights and making the hallway appear to dilate wider as it dragged itself forward. Neither agent could make out what it was, just that something very large and fast was coming for them.

Shojiro acted first. He un-holstered his gun and turned to one of the many anonymous locked doors that lined the hallway. Keiko was moving to stop him - if one of those rooms housed a boiler or a gas main, he might cause an explosion trying to shoot off the lock - when the blackness surged forward, covering twenty meters in scant seconds, and waved a long appendage over Shojiro. For a moment Keiko thought the agent had been hit, but then he was backing away, cursing, as his gun fell to pieces.

Doesn't like guns, huh? Keiko thought as she pulled her own, and got off a single shot before pain burned through her hand. The agent tried to pull the trigger again, thought she did, but the gun failed to fire. Shojiro tackled her, pulled her away, and Keiko saw in the midst of the black mass, there dangled a slender pink object. She tried to switch hands, to get another shot off, but the pistol slipped between her fingers - blood the lubricant - and clattered on the floor. Shojiro now picked her up and was running down the hallway faster then she would have thought him capable.

At the end of the hallway Shojiro turned, and both agents saw the end of the black thing disappearing into a hole in the wall where the morgue door had been. The hallway up to that point was a half-seen disaster, all the flourescents smashed, the walls torn and bending out or listing inward. Light still came from inside the morgue, and strange shadows played across the wall opposite, which had buckled outward, making it easy to see the weird and sinuous shapes that moved inside.

The strange vibration started up again, much stronger then before. Both agents watched mutedly as something shot out of the hole the black thing had torn in the wall. What looked like a figure slammed against the buckled wall and slowly fell away from it, staggering forward. The person was strange - indistinct in ways the poor light could not account for. It appeared to look down the hall at the two agents, and had started unhurriedly in their direction when a long black arm snaked out of the hole, lifting the figure off its feet and pulling it back into the morgue.

Shojiro lowered Keiko slowly to the ground, the female agent now looking at the clean slice that had separated her trigger finger from her hand. She watched it spurt with every beat of her heart, and was making small noises like a wounded cat. The unharmed agent tore off a piece of his shirt and fashioned a bandage for the wound, then tied another piece of cloth around Keiko's wrist and used a ballpoint pen to fashion a crude tourniquet. He gently took Keiko's shaking, undamaged hand and pressed it to the pen, to hold the bandage in place. Then he walked back to where Keiko's gun had fallen and picked it up, absently wiping the blood, and glancing down the hall to Keiko, then to the morgue.

"Don't," Keiko whispered, far too low for the other agent to hear. "Don't."

Shojiro walked easily down the middle of the hall, gun gripped loosely in one hand.

Keiko tried to stand, but suddenly all she could think about was ice-cream... then the way her Aunt's flowers had been so bright she could hardly look at them. Then she thought about sand covering her body on a black beach, the small things of the ocean burrowing into her flesh beneath the surface. She saw outside herself, saw herself green in a tasteful toga that hid all her important parts - heart, lungs, brain.

Shaking, hands gripping her knees, tourniquet forgotten, Keiko Futanabe rocked back and forth in the hallway, thinking about how much stars looked like a cat's eye.

* * *

Kaji took point, only felt right after pulling rank on the Captain and taking command of the response unit. There were six men with him - the Captain and five others had remained on the ground floor to secure the decimated North entrance and guard the Second Child. 

The Nerv special operative patted his jacket pocket, felt the sharp thing he had scavenged from the debris upstairs. Hopefully the men under his temporary command would hold their fire long enough for him to use it. There was no question in Kaji's mind that a Weaver was behind the destruction above - the way rows of waiting room chairs hand been tossed aside with casual strength, the shattered information desk (part of it embedded in the ceiling), and the people that had been in the way, the shambling figures that were wounded in strange ways or crazy or both. It fit with the report on the Third Child's first encounter with the thing, that gibbering madness that settled upon any that laid eyes on a Weaver.

The small squad reached the bottom of the stairs, edged out into a darkened hallway that bowed wide. Wherever flashlights shown, the ceiling and walls were broken. The stairwell had faired much better, with only the occasional torn guardrail. Here though, there was little doubt that one of Mieville's Weavers had passed by. Mieville, the prescient socialist revolutionary - Kaji could had managed a chuckle in different circumstances.

He watched a trickle of plaster fall from the cracked ceiling, and pulled the nearest member of the response unit close.

"Find someone in maintenance, or call someone in the tech division," Kaji told him. "It would be nice to know if the building was going to fall in on us." He watched the man leave, then turned back to the hallway and carefully advanced, picking over a floor that was torn up in places, collapsed in others. He shown his light down some of the deeper holes, into what must have been a sub-basement. He indicated the holes and signed for caution, then continued on.

Some distance down the hallway Kaji could see that the destruction ended and light was visible. He could see someone laying there in the light, bloody and unmoving. Between that person - a woman, Kaji thought - and the darkness there were a series of bloody stains. The furthest was a small puddle just in front of the unconscious woman, the ones closer to the darkness being evenly spaced - footprints.

Kaji paused, playing his light carefully over the walls, trying to figure out where the morgue was. Thirty meters down, on the left, that was all the direction he had. The slow going made distance difficult to gauge, the walls so torn out he couldn't angle the beam of his flashlight more then a few meters ahead of him.

Another few steps, and a rotten smell became apparent. A few steps more, and Kaji's flashlight played across a door, pressed deep into the right wall of the hallway. Gingerly feeling his way over to it, Kaji angled his light to the left side of the corridor, and finally found the deeper black he had been searching for.

The entire wall of the morgue appeared to be torn away. Kaji's light did not penetrate the dim by much, but he could see the clean cuts where wall should have seperated the morgue room from the hallway.

Picking over the unsteady ground, Kaji got right to the lip of the opening, then signalled an all-stop. He turned off his flashlight, and listened for a moment, trying to pick out anything against the background noise of the fidgetting men behind him. Somewhere below them, there came a groaning of pipes.

A minute passed before Kaji heard something - a faint creak that might have just been more pipes settling.

He turned on his flashlight and reached into his pocket, pulling out the object he had scavenged from the upper floor. The cheap metal the scissors were made of glinted dully beneath the flashlight. Kaji gestured a man in the squad forward, one outfitted with a scout's kit. He drew squiggles in the air, and the soldier quickly opened a vinyl flap on the arm of his uniform, revealing a narrow dry-erase board and a black marker attached to the uniform by a loop of wire. Kaji took the black marker, hesitated, unsure of what to say, then carefully inscribed 'Hello Sir' down one blade of the scissors. He then flipped the scissors over and wrote 'Are You Lost?' down the inside of the other blade.

The scout, the only one that could see what he was doing, looked at him like he was crazy. Kaji merely shrugged.

Walking over to the lip of the hole, Kaji took a deep breath then shouted:  
"Weaver, I have a gift for you!"

Wincing at the sound his voice had made in the small space, Kaji raised the scissors, opened them, and slid them together. He did this twice, then tossed the object into the morgue, trying to expose as little of himself as possible.

The squad waited for a minute, uneasy at Kaji's display. He heard muttering voices behind him, and signalled for everyone to be quiet.

Two minutes passed, then three. Kaji was about to peer over the lip of the hole when something hit the wall across from the hole, sending up a shower of sparks. Shortly after this, there was a sound like tearing fabric, and then

It was like waking up from a dream. The hallway seemed less treacherous, what little light they had seemed brighter. Something had left, and everyone felt much better for it. Kaji shown his light into the hole, and slowly proceeded forward.

* * *

Misato glared at the man in black, who in turn ignored her. She was sitting in a chair beside Asuka's bed, trying to read a magazine. They had been all set to transport the Second Child to a safer location a few minutes ago, once they got a route secured - now they just barred exit, said the situation was under control, and wouldn't tell anything beyond that.  
Misato was a Major in the tactical branch of Nerv, Section 2 fell under the intelligence branch. Technically, she couldn't pull rank on the goon blocking the doorway unless the Children were in danger, not in a Major's capacity but as their guardian. Apparently Asuka was no longer in harm's way, thus no authority. What she wanted to do was smack this dumb ape around until he told her just what the fuck was going on. She had tried to contact her parallel in the intelligence branch, but Nerv's directory assistance had connected her to a line with Kaji's answering machine on the other end. That had left her bewildered and fuming - she had always wondered what his official position in the chain of command was. 

She finished the magazine, one of those stupid teen things Asuka would like, and tried to call Kaji again. This time, she got a busy signal. She got up and paced, waiting for a few minutes, and was about to call when the door opened and Kaji told the goon, roughly, to get out. He locked the door behind the broad man, then approached Misato.

In the thirty minutes from when Misato had last seen him, Kaji was managed to lose his jacket and acquire a thin layer of grime. He was covered from head to toe in a dusting of plaster, which was splotched green and red in places. Kaji walked up to her, wiping his face as he came, and suddenly he was kissing her, holding her shoulders carefully. The kiss lasted only a moment, he pulled away, probably for fear that Misato would first. Then he backed up.

"Downstairs," he said. "The thing, the Weaver was downstairs."

Misato, still dazed and smelling Kaji's scent beneath the heavier odor of mold, took a moment to process that.

"It... what about the..." Misato glanced at Asuka's sleeping form. "The body?"

Kaji laughed wretchedly, briefly disappearing into the room's small bathroom and reappearing with a wet towel in hand. He unbuttoned his shirt as he spoke.

"There are thirteen bodies down there," he began, sliding out of his shirt and drawing the towel across his chest and arms. "They were all... well, you should probably go see for yourself, just give me a minute to get clean."

Misato tried not to be distracted by Kaji's uncovered body. It helped that whatever the man had seen had pushed flirtation out of his mind. No motion Kaji made was overly suggestive, just a desperate bid to part with a nasty smell.

"Shinji's body, we found the remains of his plugsuit on one of the autopsy slabs, it was supposed to be in cold storage, according to the manifest. The plugsuit was... ah... empty." Kaji went back to the washroom, re-wet the towel, stopped, opened the outer door and told the goon waiting at the threshold to go get him some clothes, he didn't care from where. He returned to the room and drew the privacy curtain around Asuka's bed, then unbuckled his belt and took off his pants, make a warding-off gesture to Misato.

"There was yellow fluid standing in the plugsuit, and on the slab, and a pool of it underneath. It... ah... looked like LCL." Kaji wiped both legs down, took off his shoes and socks and wiped there too. Then he went to the restroom, got a fresh towel, and began to repeat the process.

"The other bodies... well, you'll see. You do want to go down there, right?"

Misato nodded, trying to feign indifference to Kaji's nearly-naked body.

"Well then... uh... do you have any perfume?" Kaji was smelling the towel, his arms, still making a face at what his nose was telling him.

Misato went over to tiny bereau built into the wall, where she had stored some of Asuka's personal effects. She had some lavendar perfume in there, figured Asuka would like that. She handed the bottle to Kaji, who proceeded to use half of it on himself.

"Hold out your wrist," he said. Misato complied, and Kaji sprayed her several times, until her hand was soaked with the stuff. The Special Operative was eyeing his old clothes with disdain when the goon entered without ceremony, doctor's scrubs in hand.

"Sorry sir, this was all they wanted to give me," the tall man explained, holding up the aquamarine-colored pants and shirt. Then he crinkled his nose. "What the..."

"Thanks," Kaji took the items from goon, then ushered him outside. As he pulled on the light clothing and his own socks and shoed, Kaji grinned at Misato, a bit of the old charm finally returning. "Remind you of anything, Katsuragi?"

Misato rolled her eyes.

* * *

Nerv technicians were already at work in the basement, stringing up lights and in several places erecting beams meant to stabilize the ceiling. Kaji and Misato still had to pick their way forward carefully, none of the holes in the floor had been covered yet. 

Misato noticed that the technicians were trying to avoid looking at the large hole in the wall she assumed led to the morgue. As Misato hopped over the final tear in the floor and accepted Kaji's hand to pull her over and into the morgue, she understood why.

Thirteen bodies. Thirteen seperate earthly vessels. Old and young, male and female. One head, two legs, two arms.

All as one.

Kaji came up behind her, but Misato wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of collapsing. She locked her legs in place, kept her eyes open, and saw and saw and saw.

Legs surrounded it like gilding, supporting it. Misato could see the pallid sac between those mismatched legs was hanging just slightly off the ground. The arms had been attached, seemingly at random, to the top dome of it. Each was bent is a particular, deliberate way. One small hand flashed a victory symbol, arm bent at a right angle, while another was split down the middle, the seperation beginning at the elbow and running down to the middle finger, the two halves seperated and misaligned, the cross-section of bone and muscle apparent. Another hand had been cut in such a way that the flesh seemed to loop downwards in a spiral, the arm stretched long under its own weight, each finger a twisted gnarl of flesh twelve or more inches long. Twenty six hands, all different in mutilation.

Misato took one step forward. Another.

The outer shell was made of torso-flesh, bound tight. There was a breast, here, a navel. The patches did not exactly match up, some were hairy, others slightly darker or unusually pale. There were no apparent seams in the flesh, save where hairy flesh met smooth, tanned flesh. The whole thing was damp and translucent. Beneath the flesh Misato saw faces, which bore expressions from happiness to sadness to terror and the gamut between. Spacing apart each head and apparently accounting for most of the grotesque thing's bulk were the parts of humans one does not normally wish to see - ropey intestines, fetal-shaped kidneys, lungs, heart. Spines and ribs mixed into the mess of organs, piercing and rupturing them, from what little Misato could see.

Kaji touched her gently on the shoulder, and Misato did not even flinch.

"Around," he said gently.

They circled the thing, and on the other side Misato saw the thing had ruptured at one point. The tear in the rough sphere started halfway up the top hemisphere and extended downward. Pulped human being had spilled out, a slick tongue of bodies that extended back into the wound. Misato thrust her perfume-wet wrist under her nose.

Kaji pulled her away, or tried to.

"Katsuragi, the plugsuit, this way."

Still Misato would not budge, so Kaji picked her up and spun her around. She barely resisted at all. He spun her so she was facing the bank of refrigerated cells and steel autopsy tables. Then he got in front of her and got her eyes to track his own.

"You came down here to see what we found. Shinji, remember?"

Misato slowly nodded, wrist still close to her face.

Kaji led her forward to the middle autopsy table, on which rested a battered, half-gone plugsuit. As Kaji had said, the suit was sitting in a pool of yellow fluid. Misato reached forward and tipped the upper frame of the plugsuit up, and more fluid sluiced out of the neck. There was a pool of the stuff under the table.

* * *

As Katsuragi took in the strange remains of the Third Child, an agent came up behind Kaji. 

"You should probably see this, sir," he said.

Kaji patted Katsuragi on the shoulder, and walked across the room and back out into the hall, where one of Section 2's forensic men was taking a picture a strange item embedded in the wall. The scissor he had thrown into the morgue ahead of his squad now appeared to be lodged into the wall opposite it. That sharp sound they had heard just before the Weaver left, the sparks on the wall, it must have been this, Kaji guessed.

The Weaver had apparently gotten Kaji's message, a response was embossed into the cheap metal of the scissors.

'All as one. Your' read one blade, 'exclimation point.' read the other. That was... very interesting.

Katsuragi tapped him on the shoulder. Kaji leaned to one side so the Major could see the scissors. Then he carefully lead her out of the basement.

* * *

They went to Asuka's room. The girl was still asleep. 

"I don't know what I'm supposed to tell her," Misato said, staring at the sleeping girl.

"Maybe... well, you either tell the truth or something like it," Kaji replied as he opened all the windows in the room, trying to air out the scent of lavender.

Misato was shaking now, looking down at Asuka, mouth half opened.

"What the hell is this thing?" she whispered. "Why did I have to go down there?"

"That data I gave you," Kaji said. "Read it. Try to keep in mind how very Other this thing is."

Misato found the data drive in her pocket, then started digging through the small drawer at Asuka's bedside for the girl's school laptop. Kaji watched her, watched the way she moved, absently noted the way her ass looked when she bent over. Until she had read everything he had given her, it would be useless to appeal to her for anything.

"Katsuragi, you have two hours," Kaji said, heading for the door. "After that, I'm coming in here and taking you to the closest bar we can find, you hear me?"

Misato gave no sign she had heard, instead turning on Asuka's red laptop and sliding the data drive into place. As the door opened and shut, the Major brought up the device directory and opened the file Kaji had given her.

"Perdido Street Station" read the title, centered, in e-book format, "by China Mieville."


	6. Six

**The Weaver**

Six

* * *

"You can just smile."

Rei Ayanami opens her eyes. Pilot Ikari stands in front of her, in his school uniform. The Commander's ruined glasses are perched on the bridge of his nose. Rei strides towards him and removes the glasses, causing an exaggerated response by Pilot Ikari she would later understand was a part of the male libido. He backs away from her, then pitches forward, falling on her, one hand closing around her breast.

-

Now she and Pilot Ikari are descending into the Geo-Front. The Commander's son has just asked her if she is afraid to take part in the reactivation test with Unit Zero.

"Don't you have faith in your own father's work?" she asks him.

Of course not, he says. How could I trust him?

Rei turns and slaps him.

-

Pilot Ikari is inside a medical device after being attacked by the Fifth Angel. She sits in the room, holding the Commander's glasses.

He is in a bed now, leaning over a new plugsuit. The covers fall away from his body, revealing his chest and stomach and pubic hair.

"Don't show up looking like that, Ikari," she says.

He immediately covers himself and apologizes, and asks her if he really has to pilot again.

"Of course," she says.

But what if I don't want to? he asks.

"Then I will pilot Unit One."

-

It is now thirty minutes later, Ikari is dressed in his school uniform and ready to depart the hospital.

-

Doctor Akagi and Captain Katsuragi are briefing Pilot Ikari on the use of the JSSDF's positron rifle. She is not directly addressed, standing to one side in the harsh light.

"I am to just defend Unit One, correct?" she asks.

That's correct, Doctor Akagi says.

-

She is in the changing room, putting on her plugsuit. A narrow, translucent blind separates her from Pilot Ikari.

Maybe this will be our last day alive, he says.

"Why would you say something like that?" she says, sealing her plugsuit. "You won't die, I will be protecting you."

-

Now she is now sitting on the Evangelion scaffolding next to Pilot Ikari. He has just asked her why she pilots.

"Because I'm bonded to it," she replies.

To my father? he asks.

"To all people," she replies. "I have nothing else."

"It is time," she says, rising. "Goodbye."

-

She is inside the entry plug. Her skin is burned and not burned, the neural feedback not bad as it might have been, because she is not yet well synchronized with Unit Zero. The external hatch groans, and then opens. She looks up and sees Pilot Ikari.

He tells her to never say that she has nothing else, and to never say goodbye before going on a mission.

"I am sorry," she says. "I don't know what to do or say at a time like this."

You can just smile, he says, tears in his eyes.

That moment, that image. Rei could not escape it.

-

In her bedroom. She is on the floor, naked. Shinji has just clumsily fallen onto her. She feels his hand on her breast. Their eyes meet, something Rei had failed to notice until now.

"Why do you act the way you do?" she asks him, breaking the script.

The image of Shinji Ikari says nothing. It cannot. The memory of Shinji Ikari is incomplete - she cannot begin to guess what his response might have been.

But then, the image warps:

_Back in the hospital._

_Do I really have to pilot again?  
"Of course."_

_What if I don't want to?_

_"Then I will pilot Unit One."_

_He decides to pilot._

The vision comes quickly, and after it washes over Rei, she is still under Shinji. This disturbs her - she has never lost control inside her own mind before. She concentrates, and wakes up.

-

Rei Ayanami opened her eyes in the here and now. Her apartment was dark, nothing save the moonlight illuminating it. She curled into a ball beneath the sheets of her bed, the pain in her stomach compelling her to do nothing but remember.

* * *

"They would have told us, don't you think?" Kensuke asked. "I mean, we're their classmates. If someone got killed or something, they'd tell us, right?"

It was lunch period. Touji was eating some fancy bento while Kensuke wondered at the prolonged absence of Shinji, Asuka, and Rei Ayanami.

"Stop talkin' about it," Touji mumbled as he chewed his sashimi. "They'll come back eventually, they always do."

As they talked, Kensuke noticed Touji glancing over to Hikari Horaki, the Class Representative. Hikari seemed to be glancing at Touji as well, though the two never looked at one another at exactly the same time.

"Hey Touji. Where'd you get that bento, huh?" Kensuke asked, sure he knew the answer.

"What does that matter, huh? You want one?" came the guarded reply.

"So, Horaki?" Kensuke smirked as he said this, edging away.

"Yeah, Horaki. What?"

"Man, you are eating the Class Rep's food. This isn't news?"

"So what? She made me a bento. Said it was her responsibility to keep the class fit. Said I couldn't go buying lunch from the school store anymore."

Kensuke was about to reply to this when the teacher entered along with...

"Oh dammit," Kensuke muttered, gesturing to the front. Touji turned and saw the teacher with two other people, some chick in red with a beret and a man wearing a black three-piece, his hair back in a ponytail. It took him a moment to recognize Misato Katsuragi as the woman wearing red, her normally happy or reflective features were now merely somber.

"You dumbass," Touji hissed. "You just had to fucking say something!"

Hikari had left her group of friends and approached the teacher. They briefly conferred while Misato's eyes roamed across the room, lingering briefly on Touji and Kensuke.

The Class Rep had finished talking with the teacher, and now turned to address the class.

"Attention!" Hikari commanded. "Everyone please pay attention. Miss Katsuragi of Nerv has come to make an announcement."

* * *

They let them out of class afterwards. Hikari had latched on to Touji right after the announcement, and he had taken her home. She had been crying, and Touji had sort of shrugged and gone along with it because, well...

Kensuke did not have much problem accepting the announcement. He had gone straight from school to the arcade. It was the nature of being a soldier, after all. Death and all that were expected on the battlefield, he thought as he poured credit after credit into the arcade machines.

He stayed at the arcade for eight hours. When it closed, he bought some junk food and a soda from a vending machine down the street, and ate sitting on a bench nearby. Then he carefully deposited the wrappers from his meal into the proper trash receptacle, and threw the glass soda bottle through the display window of one of the vending machines.

* * *

Gendo Ikari was not simply the Commander of Nerv, he was also a scientist. Units Zero and One had been created using his techniques, his technology. It had been the Ikaris who had first perfected the Evangelion's genetic structure, and the methods to manufacture one. Though he now occupied an administrative position, Gendo still spent a great deal of his time in Sector 32, an area several hundred feet beneath Central Dogma, where his laboratory was.

Ikari had no use for morality. Mankind was facing extinction, the very idea that someone would try to restrict his research because they found it "objectionable" offended Ikari. He did understand discretion, however. Secrecy was something with which he was well acquainted. So Section 32, Ikari's Lab, was inaccessible to everyone save himself, Doctor Akagi, Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki, and Rei Ayanami.

The lab was run down, but completely functional. In many places tarps had been hung over equipment, walls and ceilings torn out and repaired in amateurish fashion - he could hardly trust a maintenance crew to fix things, so Ikari had Ritsuko do it. The sector was six hundred feet long, a narrow hallway that branched out into many rooms, each of which had a unique function. In one of these rooms, the thing called Ayanami had been born.

Ikari sat in one of the many rooms, in front of three computer monitors. The monitor to Gendo's left displayed a complete genetic profile, the middle one displayed six possible permutations of the sourced genetic code. The monitor on the right was, for the moment, displaying a black screen. He considered each of the six DNA sequences he had spent the last three hours tailoring, made sure the primary physiology was intact. He was trying to encode very specific data into the genetic structure - a hack he had learned while developing the Ayanami series. At that thought, he glanced at the dark monitor, noting Rei's profile at the entrance to the room. She had been there for almost thirty minutes now.

At last deciding that each line of genetic code was structurally intact - no stop or go sequences inserted improperly - he sent the data to the MAGI, where it would be processed in a discrete cache and then returned to local computer assets. When he was sure the transfer had gone through, he at last turned to face Rei.

"You may enter," he said.

The girl crossed the threshold into the room. "May I speak with you please?" she asked, simply standing just inside the doorway.

Gendo appraised her carefully. This particular unit had been operating for long enough that her features were unique. There were certain tells in her body language that Gendo had learned to read over the last two years she had been active. Her legs were spaced slightly further apart then normal, and she was staring at him intensely. Her hands were loosely cupped. He had never seen her act in this way, and it was fascinating... and possibly dangerous.

"Speak," Gendo ordered, glancing to check the progress of the MAGI report, then back to the girl.

"How do humans deal with this thing 'loss'?" the girl asked.

Ikari stood and walked over to Rei, taking in every detail, watching her eyes follow his own. Her expression was blank, but her stance belied a certain energy - a frustration. Gendo glanced back at his computer equipment, then at the First Children.

"You miss the Third Child?" he asked.

Rei opened her mouth, then simply nodded.

This was unfortunate. The Ayanami series was supposed to function as a translation mechanism, but it seemed that some latent human psychology was bleeding through. Ikari was unaware of data retention between Ayanamis, he did not have enough data to be sure of anything... yet. This Ayanami had suddenly become very dangerous - Ikari was worried that these traces of humanity would pervert the thing that lived in the host body. It would be prudent to terminate this one and activate another before her personality developed any further. But... it also might be useful to allow humanity to develop in this body. If the soul which inhabited the Ayanami series was indeed aware of being reincarnated, then the damage was already done, and destroying this Ayanami would only exacerbate things.

Ikari stood before one of his creations, and carefully considered his options.

Behind him, the computer chimed. The Commander returned to his chair and started a program to compare the results to the ideal parameters. Rei came up behind him and watched, that strange energy still apparent in her movements. When the program began to run, Ikari spun around in his chair to face Rei again, steepling his hands together. Should he kill this unit, or not? Would this unit even...

"First Child, kill yourself," he ordered.

"Why?" the girl's expression didn't change, he could not tell what she was thinking, but it seemed certain that her previous unconditional resolve had disintegrated. Half a year ago she would have stuck a finger through her own eye at such a request. The question was...

"If you kill yourself, I will bring the Third Child back to life," the Commander stated, observing the way the Ayanami unit actually twitched at his request. Then she started looking for something sharp.

"Stop. Disregard what I said," he ordered.

She missed the Third Child, she felt 'loss'. She was willing to kill herself to bring him back. If Ayanami were a real person, Ikari would have suspected the Third and First had been in some sort of intimate relationship that had escaped the notice of Section 2. As things were now, he saw her behavior as a defect in his own design, an irrational factor that defied control.

"Rei, do you know who Naoko Akagi is?" Ikari asked.

"Doctor Akagi's mother, sir," the girl replied.

"Have you ever interacted with this person?" he continued.

"She did terminate me."

There it was. Naoko, Gendo's first lover after Yui's disappearance, had killed the first in the Ayanami series, then herself. Why she had done it, no one knew.

"Rei, why did Naoko kill you?" the Commander asked. It was still possible that the daughter Akagi had mentioned her mother and how she died to Rei. Ikari knew full well Ritsuko hated Rei for a variety of reasons, most imaginary.

"I called her something you called her. 'Old woman', or 'hag'. I did not know this was inappropriate. When Doctor Akagi learned you were the one who called her this, she killed me."

There was the great unknown. No doubt any longer, the thing that lived in the Ayanami foils was remembering each incarnation. The damage had already been done. Best to try and co-opt the new psychology.

"When our scenario is born out, I will be able to see Yui. If you wish, you may see the Third Child again."


	7. Seven

Author's Notes: Some of you will notice a continuity error here. I am aware of it and will re-organize the chapters so the bit at the high-school comes later.

* * *

** The Weaver  
**

Seven

* * *

Ritsuko Akagi knew something was wrong the moment she stepped into Sector 32. The hallway that connected the various rooms was unlit, and the instrumental music that was playing over the PA system was skipping. She took a hesitant step forward, then two back.

She swiped her access card through the reader beside the exterior door again, then tapped a code into the numeric pad that appeared on the small screen built into the wall. The doctor attempted to access the sector's security systems, but was blocked, a red screen warning her that her clearance was not high enough. Ritsuko laughed and had the MAGI tear the sector's system apart and rebuild it in their own systems. Then she cycled through several camera feeds, all of which showed nothing but static.

Next she checked the lighting and partitioning system. Sector 32 was nominally a completely open room, the mechanical subsystems of which used panels built into the floor and ceiling to create smaller compartments. The narrow hallway layout with many segregated rooms appeared on the screen. The schematic appeared in two colors - red and blue. According to the onscreen legend the MAGI had compiled for her, the red areas indicated partition paneling that was no longer responding to the sector's subsystem.

Bad. The sector had been damaged. By an explosion, perhaps? She was never certain what Ikari was working on in there, but he had mentioned tinkering with his son's genetic structure. Not a science that lent itself to explosions.

The lighting system had shorted out - Ritsuko got a device error when she tried to access it. First she checked to make sure the MAGI had aligned ports properly when it had recreated the room's OS. Finding no flaw there, she tried accessing the emergency lighting, which was on a contained circuit and was battery-powered. Most of those systems responded. Ritsuko had the MAGI start examining these emergency lighting systems, which were based off passive wireless tech, and found only a binary switch within them. Apparently the emergency lighting was not a primary security concern.

Ritsuko turned on the emergency lights, and the hallway through the door beside her was illuminated in red. She brought up a keyboard applet and typed out a quick message to Maya, telling her where she was and when to come looking for her. Then she locked the door open and passed through.

For a hundred feet, things appeared to be normal, though most of the light fixtures where black stains on the wall. The hallway itself was intact, and there was no damage to any of the equipment in any of the rooms that branched off it. The red glow was creepy though, even to someone as thoroughly secular as Ritsuko. Distance was uncertain, the hallway dissolving into a dim black mass - normally she would have been able to see from one side of the sector to the other the moment she entered it.

She was approaching the area where the partition subsystem had reported errors. Ritsuko stopped looking at passing rooms and focused on simply going forward. The red-black dim sucked her in, and she did not notice it grow larger and larger, until she smacked right into a wall of debris. A sharp point caught her in the stomach, she cried out and backed away, one hand bracing against the wall, the other reaching forward to the place where the hallway should be. The emergency lighting here was active, but only barely. Her adjusting eyes picked out bits of wall and scientific equipment. It was packed loosely, but she could not push it away. In the spaces between the broken equipment, she could detect no light.

I should go and get security down here, she thought. There has been an explosion and Gendo is hurt, maybe dead.

She started to walk back, but entered one of the branching rooms instead. First going to the left, she found an intact room that functioned as a kitchenette. The room across from that one, however, was missing a wall. The doctor picked her way over the debris and continued past the point where the hallway had been blocked.

The rest of the sector had been flattened. The partitioning had been ripped away, in some places apparently torn from its mooring. Steel panels three inches thick were scattered everywhere, along with various shattered equipment. The emergency lights mostly worked here, and everything was again cast in crimson that faded to black.

As the doctor took in the devastation, she walked into something. One moment testing an area of floor to make sure it was stable, the next she felt a slight pressure on her arm, and it exploded with pain. She fell back, and found a fine pattern of cuts running up her arm. The cloth of her lab coat had been segmented in exactly the same manner.

The doctor stood, and scrutinized the area of space that had just damaged her. It took half a minute for her eyes to properly adjust and see that there was something distorting the image of the larger room. She picked up a piece of rubble and tossed it to a relatively undamaged portion of floor beyond the area where she had been hurt. The item did not appear to encounter resistance as it passed through the air, but when it hit the floor, it did so in pieces. Ritsuko would have thought it had shattered, if steel lent itself to that sort of thing.

She picked up a longer piece of partitioning and poked it forward, watching as the tip was simply whittled away. She sweeped the metal in front of her, and slowly felt her way deeper into the room. The barrier appeared to be in a line perpendicular to the walls, and Ritsuko almost walked face-first into the second barrier, which ran parallel. It was then that she figured out the trick, and would have thought herself stupid had the whole situation been absolutely unfathomable. The barriers were mimicking the original configuration of the partitions in Sector 32. She waved the metal rod around the barrier running the length of the Sector, and found an area of space that didn't seem to want to shred her - the doorway. She made her way out into the hallway and proceeded forward carefully, the other end of the laboratory finally in sight.

"Built it. Gift," the voice almost made Ritsuko scream, coming out of nowhere.

"Nanowire," the voice continued. "Web. Was sorry it had to destroy my arcanum, so it tried to repair. Got bored, went away."

A pile of rubble rose some distance away, and resolved itself into a human form. Ritsuko approached, still waving her now-short piece of metal in front of her. It took her a minute or so to get close enough to recognize the Commander.

"Gendo?" the woman continued a guarded approach. "What happened here?"

"Sorry, I can't do it," the Commander stated, now kneeling on the ground and sifting through the wreckage. "I had it though, I had his neural connections encoded right into the DNA. That kind of resolution... a breakthrough. Then it came, and said I was wrong. It told me that our son's pattern can't exist, would crowd out what is coming."

Ritsuko finally determined that there was no barrier between herself and Ikari, and knelt down next to him as he sifted through the wreckage.

"What do you mean, our son Gendo?" Ritsuko used his first name again, she knew it irritated him when she did that.

The man looked up at her, and Ritsuko saw something haunted, something lost.

"Shinji. Our son, Yui," the man said. Then he kissed her. Ritsuko fell back, Ikari bearing down on her. By some miracle her back found an area clear of debris.

"Ikari, you're... something is...!" the doctor said, trying to push him off. Then he kissed her again and reached under her skirt.

"I can't believe you are here," he muttered as his lips left hers and he grabbed one of her breasts with his free hand. "But I knew, I knew I'd see you again."

The doctor's objections faded as the Commander went to work, and soon an entirely different sound filled the dark, strange space.

* * *

Asuka was riding in a train car. Colored amber with a setting sun, she regarded the thing sitting opposite her.

"Sorry, intent, just that," the indistinct person across from her said. "Sentient? Far from it. Found this place in the deeper structures, a memory that is also a place. I die? Become a thing like your mother? This would be my trainyard."

Asuka remembered this entity, the thing that danced and flickered from place to place in that misty trainyard. With slowly dawning horror, Asuka realized that she was completely aware. This was not the half-stupid delusion of a lucid dream, It was like being awake.

She tried to stand, but could not. She wanted to scream, but could not. Awake and immobile in a dream.

"Can hear you, can feel you," the intruder murmured, standing. "Sorry sorry sorry, but best way, only way. Need to remember what you saw in the monster, who you met there. Just bridging, performing a bit of neuromancy. Impressing all of this into actual memory, 'stead of the evanescent that just slides off after you wake up."

It reached out and touched her, and she was able to stand. She tried to back away, but every time she broke contact with the intruder, she froze.

"Intent, all I am. Purpose served now. Somewhere, someone knew you. Somewhere, someone heard you whisper for your mother in the warm-dark. Protect, see? Give you what you want, see? Did that. Animated intent, like I said."

Asuka was now against the side of the carriage, the intruder left her frozen, and went to the side opposite.

"This thing I am, will cease to exist three hours ago. Nice job with the Web, allows a bit of leeway with such things."

And then the indistinct person was gone, and Asuka woke up.

* * *

Misato was halfway through Kaji's notes, still in an intense state of concentration, when Asuka woke up screaming at the top of her lungs. The school laptop Misato had been using made a graceful arc through the air as the Major dove to the floor and started fumbling with her shoulder holster.

Asuka was out of the bed and on top of Misato before the older woman could draw her gun. The red-head smacked the older woman across the face and then tried to choke her.

"I am not a fucking doll!" the girl screeched. "You think you can..."

Misato, finally recognizing that her assailant was the Second Child, rather then a giant spider or something equally unsavory, stopped fumbling with her shoulder holster. She yanked Asuka's hands from her neck and pushed the girl off her, confused and entirely not prepared to deal with any more shit.

The girl was trying to find her feet when Misato grabbed her by the hospital gown and threw her back onto the bed. There, the Second Child curled into a ball and started to cry, drawing the twisted covers over her entire body.

"Mama," the girl screamed. "What did they do to you, mama?"

Misato stood at the foot of the bed, shaking and trying very hard not to. She pulled out her cell phone, dialed Kaji's number, then snapped the phone shut without sending the call. He would probably just... complicate things.

The Major went to the private washroom and got a glass of water, drank it, then refilled it and took it over to the bed. She sat next to the quivering figure and slowly pulled the covers away. The red-head stared at her wildly, but didn't try to attack her again. Misato gestured with the glass of water, and the girl slowly rose to a sitting position, sniffling quietly. The Major handed over the glass of water, and watched as the young girl downed it.

"Okay now?" the Major asked.

The girl nodded. "I need to use the bathroom though."

The Major walked over and casually blocked the external door while the Second Child used the washroom.

"W-would you mind telling me what that was all about?" Misato asked through the door.

There was a barely audible response.

"What?"

"I said, I thought you were somebody else, dammit!" the red-head yelled in the washroom. "And why does everything smell like cheap perfume!"

The Major sighed and looked at her watch. It had been almost an hour since Kaji had given her that god-damn...

"Oh... shit," she walked over to the school laptop, which had landed on the protruding portion of the memory drive Kaji had given her. The peripheral was now jutting through the keyboard and digging in the half-folded laptop's screen.

Misato tried to tug the drive out, and it fragmented in her hands. She sighed and tossed the expensive paperweight to one side, hearing it crack against the floor and not really caring.

Hey, Asuka, congratulations on your first solo kill. By the way...

The Second Child emerged from the washroom, looked first at Misato, then at her broken laptop.

"What the fuck Katsu-!"

"Shinji's dead." Oh fuck.

Asuka was looking at the laptop again. She held this position for nearly a minute.

"You broke my laptop," the girl murmured. "And... huh."

The girl walked over to the low set of drawers and pulled out the clothing Misato had brought for her. She untied her hospital gown and let it drop. Clad only in white panties, she stared out the room's windows. It was night, and there were only streetlights and illuminated buildings to be seen. Finally reaching some sort of impass, she started to pull her clothing on.

"What. Happened?" the girl spat out each word.

Misato came up beside her, glancing out the window to see whatever the Second Child had seen and finding nothing.

He had a heart attack. There was a docking accident with Unit One and the rail system, he was electrocuted. He died instantly.

"It looks like suicide." I'm a total joke.

The red-head smiled at that. "That... you're joking." She watched the older woman shake her head in the window's reflection, then look to one side. There was a hopeless quality to her movements that conveyed something words could not.

Asuka finished dressing, then started pushing Misato towards the door.

"Home. Now. Please," she said.

The Major didn't protest.

* * *

The drive back to the apartment was quiet, save for the cursing from Asuka every time Misato hit a curb or narrowly avoided a guard-rail. When they finally arrived and parked, Asuka pushed the door open and slammed it.

"When the fuck are you going to learn to drive, you ditzy bitch?" the girl screamed.

Misato, halfway out of the car herself, almost stumbled. The Second Child's voice echoed in the emptiness of the parking lot. Then Misato was rounding the car...

"You're what, thirty-five? You give us orders in battle and you can't even 'pilot' this rice-burning piece of..."

Misato smacked the girl, much harder then she probably should have.

"I am very tired," the Major said in a distant voice, hauling the Second Child off the ground and pressing her against the car. "I have put up with a lot of shit today, and I have had enough, thank you."

The thing in the hospital basement, the knowledge Kaji had given her... and then...

of course...

Shinji was dead...

Hot tears ran down Misato's face. The Second Child saw this, braced against the car, and sent the Major staggering back. Then the girl darted forward and grabbed the car keys Misato had loosely grasped in her hand.

The Second Child opened the passenger side door, closed it, and locked it. She scrambled over the gear-shift and closed the driver side door, which Misato had left ajar. Then she started the car up, screamed something at Misato the older woman couldn't hear, pulled out of the parking spot and shot out into the street.

Misato Katsuragi barely saw any of this. She just stood in the parking lot and sobbed into her hands.

The Weaver hurt Shinji. Took his hand. Such defilement.

Shinji is thirty years old. Looks like his father. Still doesn't have his right hand. Shinji, quiet. Shinji, maimed. Her charge, her brother, her son. Shinji broken, brain leaking, bones protruding like - the thing in the basement, where he...

She didn't even have a body to bury.

* * *

Kaji was trying to coax Keiko Futanabe to talk about something other then the low, low prices at this one shop she had visited twice in Tokyo when his cell phone rang.

"I lost Asuka," Misato's voice sounded strange.

"Lost... how?" Kaji glanced at the female Section 2 agent, and went over to the exterior side of the room for better reception. Behind him, Keiko expanded that the store was mainly for cats. Very hard to enter and leave. Everything was cat-sized, including the entrance.

"We, uh, had a little fight," the Major sniffed into the phone. "She... kinda took my car."

Oh... oh, wonderful. "Well, I know she can drive. They let her in Germany." Kaji waved to Keiko, who was now taking off her shirt.

"I can't... do this. No more," there was a sound in the background, a passing car.

"Where are you, exactly?"

Hands on her bra-covered chest, Keiko wondered aloud why her right breast was the exact same size as the left one, but the left one was heavier.

"I can't... parking lot. I don't want to go up there," the Major sighed. "I haven't been since... you know... and I just need to... a minute to gather myself."

"Hungry?" Kaji was watching the young Section 2 psychologist reach to unhook her bra.

"...yeah."

"So am I, so here is what we should..." the bra was off, "should... how about you go upstairs and make something, and I come over in maybe twenty..." Keiko squeezed one firm, brown-tipped breast, and Kaji made a little noise in the back of his throat, "...make that thirty minutes. I'll bring something potent, huh?"

Easier to sing, in balance, Keiko was saying.

"...is there someone there, with you?" Misato's voice lost its strange detachment.

"Yeah, I'm trying to interview one of the... someone. She is... talkative."

Keiko grabbed the pen Kaji had been using to take noted, and flicked it against her left nipple, which was erect.

"Come now. I'll go up and make something, but if you are going to come over, leave right now," Misato's tone was familiar. It had a quality Kaji hadn't heard for several years.

Then Keiko stabbed the pen into her breast, just above the areola. Kaji yelled a curse and dropped the cell phone. He rushed over, grabbing the crazed woman's arm just as she was bringing the pen down a second time.

"Easier, see? Now I'm balanced!" the woman happily bounced to her feet, her hands crossed in front of her so her breasts were squeezed together, jutting out, bouncing along with her. Her left breast was bloody, the red stain extending down below her belly and onto her uniform pants.

Kaji glanced around the room, making sure there weren't any sharp objects handy, then left the woman and knocked three times on the outer door, knowing that this wasn't going to look good no matter how he spun it. Bloody topless woman, not in her right mind. He should have had someone in the room to witness. The guards outside took one look at Keiko and yelled down the hallway for a doctor. Kaji backed back into the room and picked up the cell phone.

"Still there?" he spoke into it.

"What was..."

"I'll wrap things up here, then come over. Something potent, right," he snapped the phone shut.

* * *

It took thirty minutes for Kaji to get out of the hospital. Five minutes of nasty stares from guards and the doctor that attended Keiko, ten minutes physically restraining Keiko after she broke her aluminum folding chair on the doctor's face and tried to pry out the female physician's teeth. They had had to tie her to a gurney, and then weigh down the gurney frame with cinderblocks someone had found in a maintenance closet, because she kept tipping it over. Why a state-of-the-art hospital had not one straight-jacket, Kaji could not fathom.

After they had her squared away, other hospital staff took over, and Kaji, the guards, and the doctor all went outside and smoked a few cigarettes. Looking into the darkness and the park that bordered that side of the hospital, it was quietly concluded that Kaji had gone for help after the patient had stabbed herself, and her shirt and bra had been removed in order to treat the wound, in the presence of witnesses.

The doctor, a woman in her mid-thirties, slipped Kaji her phone number when the two guards weren't looking. Kaji pocketed it, but didn't have the force of will to so much as wink at her.

After smoking two cigarettes, Kaji begged off and walked around the exterior of the hospital to the parking lot. At his car, he called up Section 2 and let them know that Asuka was loose, and that they needed to find her. He told them she was in Major Katsuragi's car. Then he hung up and turned off his phone. Enough of this.

* * *

Ryogi Kaji stared at the thing in front of Katsuragi's apartment door. Hefting the shopping bag over one shoulder, he climbed onto it and wedged himself onto its back, tapped the buzzer with his foot, and rested both feet against the doorframe. He waited, heard things moving inside, and then the door hissed open.

Misato was wearing cropped jean-shorts and a sleeveless yellow t-shirt. Kaji had a good view of her cleavage, being higher off the ground then normal. Katsuragi leaned forward against the frame, giving him an even better view.

"I see you met chubby," she said, her voice still flat.

Kaji kicked the enormous Buddha's back with the heel of his shoe, then jumped down, pressing against Misato.

"Brought the booze," he said.

The door closed behind them.

* * *

Dinner was a bowl into which Misato had dumped several instant meals. It reminded Kaji of the potluck meals they had eaten with Akagi and their other friends in college. He mentioned this to Misato, who barely acknowledged it. She sat across from him, not looking at him, a hand covering a glass of the sake he had brought. She picked a string bean out of the large bowl, sniffed it, and popped it into her mouth.

Kaji sipped his own glass of sake. He had never seen Katsuragi like this before. She was simply... numb.

He considered leaving. Misato obviously needed time to sort this shit out, to grieve. She didn't need him here, and he had a come-hither phone number burning a hole in his pocket. He had come to comfort her, yes, but he also wanted to get in her pants. There seemed little chance of that, right now.

So, why not leave?

He picked a bit of gray meat out of the bowl, sniffed as Misato had, and put it on the plate in front of him. It had gone bad, in the peculiar way freeze-dried foodstuffs can.

Why not leave this woman to her quiet misery, call up that doctor, and have some fun?

The noodles were still good, he twirled his chopsticks around and brought them to his lips.

Would she even notice if I left?

A sip of sake went down smokey, smooth.

Does it matter to her?

A radish, still good. He crunched it thoughtfully.

Why am I still here?


	8. Eight

**The Weaver**

Eight

* * *

Four in the morning and the dark was thick and loud with the sound of cicada. Asuka Langley Sohryu sat on the hood of Katsuragi's blue Renault, sipping a diet soda and staring at nothing. She had stopped at a small, automated fueling station somewhere in Tokyo 3 suburbia. Beyond the sodium-white light that lit the station there glowed weakly the residential street running parallel to the one Asuka had parked on - a band of low orange lights hovering just above the grass of the field separating the two roads. 

The redhead was trying to calm down, but since stealing the car two hours ago, her hands would not stop shaking. Her mind was working as though in the grip of a fever, centering on no concrete image but giving her a hellish menagerie - the smell of blood inside Unit Two as the purification systems shut down, the sound of bare feet slapping against the cobblestone of that strange trainyard, the taste of a particular sushi Shinji had made that she had liked, the words of Goodnight Moon tangled together and repeated over and over, the way her mother had felt...

Asuka needed to feel something, to express herself in a particular way, but had forgotten how. When the thing that looked like her mother had killed itself, Asuka had not cried. She had promised herself that she would never cry again - first to be strong for her sick "mother", then to prove that she did not need anyone, even her parents. Asuka had come to Japan thinking she had gone through life on her own merit.

She had graduated from a fairly prestigious American university in a mere three years. She had participated in the development of the Evangelion Production phenotype that was being used in America to create units Three and Four. She was popular in highschool here in Tokyo 3 - that her grades were not the highest did not matter to her, it was not as though she had entrance exams to cram for or scholarships to win.

She was an Eva pilot too, but suddenly uncertain if that was something to be proud of. Asuka had thought the Marduk Institute - the organization responsible for designating pilots - had picked her because of some latent quality... but it now appeared her mother had turned Asuka into the Second Child.

To create an Evangelion, to create a pilot, it must have been necessary to imbue the artificial creature with something... sympathetic.

The Second Child finished her soda, threw it into some bushes by the road.

The cores used in the Eva series had been created some time before the Prototype phenotype had been perfected.

When had they created the core within Unit Two? It had been nearly a decade. When had her "mother" been institutionalized?

Her mother was inside Unit Two's core. Asuka could clearly imagine that thing, stored deep beneath the German Nerv branch years before construction of Unit Two had even begun. She wondered how many other mothers had met a similar fate - how many red spheres were secreted away in dusty storehouses. She wondered if any germ of awareness remained within, after all those years.

Asuka was a pilot because Nerv had murdered her mother. Ikari and the First, they must have been selected for the same reason. She had read all about Commander Ikari's little "experiments" before coming to Japan. He _had_ been suspected of murdering his wife.

The Second Child grabbed Katsuragi's jacket off the hood of the car and went through the pockets, pulling out a few hundred-yen notes.

Shinji is dead, she thought as she hopped off the car and walked over the vending machines. An image of him smiling flashed in her mind, unbidden.

It didn't matter! Asuka pushed the image away, and it was replaced by a thought that had come to her one night a few weeks ago, drifting through the mental static one experiences just before sleep. An image, a feeling. Shinji kissing her.

When this thought had first come to her, it had shocked her from near-sleep. Disgusting - the very thought of that boring little boy touching her... what did he know about that stuff, anyway? The only thing any of those _boys_ at school could understand was that she had a good body. None of them could fathom her trials, her loss! She was so beyond them intellectually... if she knew her kanji better, she could fucking teach them anything that doddering old instructor could!

But...

The hot college guy Hikari had set her up with had cancelled their date, about one hour before the Twelth Angel had appeared. He had explained to Kodama, Hikari's sister, that there was a scheduling conflict. This was related to Hikari, who angrily explained to Asuka that Japanese men were often intimidated by foreign women. While Asuka was ethnically a quarter-Japanese, she had not been saturated with the "sexist bullshit" inherent to modern Japanese culture. The boy Asuka had been going to date had probably found her biography on the Internet, or Kodama had mentioned something about Asuka that had spooked him.

That was the angriest Asuka had ever seen her friend get about anything. When she thought about it though, she decided this cultural xenophobia had already done her a few favors. After that first week of school she hardly got any love letters stuffed in her locker - apparently the boys were willing to make an exception if it had turned out she were some sort of slut.

Shinji had been different from everyone else. He had been... passive. Feminine, almost. He had not been impressed by her, and after a few weeks of living with Asuka, had not been intimidated either.

The Third Child had not been particularly bright or talented. Asuka had wanted to beat the hell out of him during that synchronization training. She had been forced to slow down to accommodate his inferior synch rate... and then he had gone and synchronized so easily with the First Child, in front of those school dweebs and Hikari! Maybe he was better at lowering his synch rate, but that was hardly anything to be proud of!

Then there had been the unclear incident the night before they engaged the Seventh Angel for the second time. Katsuragi had been finalizing the operation at Nerv, so Shinji and Asuka were alone in the apartment. Asuka had insisted they sleep in seperate rooms, rather then the common pallet the Major had been making them sleep on... but after waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, she had plopped down right next to Shinji and gone to sleep.

It had been her mistake. Asuka had figured that out shortly after waking up, and just before she would have commenced to beat the still-sleeping boy within an inch of his life. She still felt dirty though, waking up and finding Shinji sleeping scant feet away - like she had picked up a rock and found a swarming mass of insects beneath it. Even if it had been her mistake, he had been awake next to her at some point. He had moved his bedding away from her, but who was to say that he hadn't slipped a finger inside her before that?

Asuka had stood over the Third Child, a thousand vile scenarios running through her mind, and the focus of her attention had come awake. After a few moments of disorientation, the boy's eyes had focused on the girl looming over him.

If he had looked guilty about something right then, Asuka probably would have killed him. But instead of looking meek or apologetic, Shinji had surprised the hell out of Asuka by _glaring_ at her, then rolling over. He had pulling the covers up to his shoulder without saying a single word. After killing the Seventh Angel that same day, Asuka had accused Shinji of trying to kiss her the night before. His reply had been surprising and awkward. He never came out and said that he had nearly kissed her, but Asuka had understood his stammered accusations well enough.

If he had said as much that morning, she would have hit him. He would have been a creep and a pervert and a loser. Sitting on Unit Two, listening to Shinji calling her "a cheat", basking in the glow of victory, Asuka had let the whole incident slide. It wasn't like they were going to be sleeping in the same room any more.

The fueling station housed several vending machines. Asuka walked over to them and selected one at random, smoothed out a creased bill and fed it into one machine. The machine spit the money back out.

Why hadn't he kissed her, anyway? Had she not been good enough? He probably would have rather been locking lips with the First.

Asuka had boarded the Over the Rainbow determined to have Kaji before arriving at Japan - she had thought he was going to return to the German branch after escorting her across the Pacific. The voyage had taken four days. During the first two of those days, Asuka had done nothing but drop hints to the older man, teasing and suggesting and insinuating. But Kaji had grown distracted as the journey progressed. At the time Asuka had thought it to be nervousness at being with her, or maybe concern for that strange container in his quarters - top secret stuff, probably. In retrospect though, it must have been trepidation over seeing Katsuragi again that drove Kaji to distraction. Maybe Asuka's little hints had made him uncomfortable, too.

The night before meeting up with the Third Child and his guardian, Asuka had asked Kaji to come up to the flight deck with her. Alone with him at last, feeling the throb of machinery through the cold metal that was quickly growing warm beneath her, Asuka had offered herself to Kaji. She had dreamed about this, about him slowly removing her clothing, about his hands and mouth pressed against her, and the rest.

But that man had rejected her out of hand.

The vending machine finally took the yen note. Asuka pressed a few buttons at random and watched a soy bar in a pastel wrapper fall from the racks. She pulled it out of the machine and started fumbling with the wrapper as she walked back to the car. A cool breeze blew down the road, and in the distance thunder sounded.

Ryoji Kaji had turned her down. He could have fucked her and gone on with his life, but he hadn't. There was something more to the equation that she couldn't get, something other then Kaji's attraction to the Major. Asuka refused to entertain that she had simply been too young - tales of Kaji's sexual exploits in Germany pretty much ruled that out.

You're still a child, he had said to her.

...maybe just labelling yourself an adult was childish. Maybe trying to sleep with a man that is supposed to be protecting you was childish. But...

The wind picked up, and there was a flash of light in the sky. The following thunderclap was deafening, and silenced the cicada. Asuka stood poised at the curb, her mind suddenly seizing on an idea she just could not accept.

To have something before you, something you may desire... to not take it just because you could - that was not childish. What had Shinji done when he found her sleeping next to him? Had he thought himself dreaming? Had he felt her breath on his face?

She was not supposed to care, dammit! But still, Asuka could not help wondering if the Third Child had enjoyed that moment.

Asuka took a small bite of the unwrapped soy bar, then dropped it on the road. Fucking Japanese and their crazy snacks.

Right after they had killed the Seventh Angel. Shinji had stammered at her, his image hanging, translucent, above the red armor of Unit Two. The Child that maybe was not a child at all had tried to articulate something he might not have been able to understand himself...

He said she had talked about her mother in her sleep.

That indistinct thing that had moved her in the trainyard, then spoken to her in that amber-hued carriage, what had it said?

_ Somewhere, someone heard you whisper for your mother in the warm-dark.  
_

A guest of wind blew across the road and lightning reached across the sky. Thunder sounded almost immediately.

It began to rain. Asuka slowly walked around to the driver's side door of the Renault, trying to understand what that meant.

There was a roar in her ears

and everything went black.

No... her eyes were closed.

She was wet.

It was raining.

Asuka opened her eyes, found herself half-submerged in two feet of water. She tried to sit up, and her muscles shrieked in protest. The girl crawled out of the water, her hands finding easy purchase in the tall grass.

Water. Too high. Thrown away. Knocked out.

The Second Child stopped for a moment to re-order her thoughts. She looked up the incline she was laying on, could just make out the white-glow of the fueling station, now flickering. She was in a ditch on the opposite side of the road.

The water was too high, she must have been unconcious for a while. At this first ordered thought, another came bubbling to the surface: you don't drive an electric engine through a damn lightning storm, stupid. You don't even stand next to a car that might be carrying a charge!

Asuka climbed to the lip of the ditch, saw the smoke and steam rising from the trunk of Misato's car and the pavement beneath it. Lightning. She had been hit by lightning.

Then **the voice ** hit, a distant and intimate thing - something that echoed where there was no stillness. It came to Asuka on a deep frequency - past the eardrum, drowning out the sounds of the storm, the alien noise reverberating through her skull, in the nerve clusters.

Asuka turned in blind panic and tumbled back down the incline. The alien noise rasped across her forebrain and seemed to be growing louder. It also seemed that her body was slowing down, each moment spent hearing that internal cacophony sapping what little remained of her strength.

She crawled into the line of water that had formed at the ditch's lowest point, grabbing at submerged foliage and pulling herself beneath the water and forward, against a light current.

The noise was in no way diminished by Asuka's submergence. The redhead might have meant to use the water as a barrier, but thinking was difficult with** the voice** in there with the rest of her thoughts.

The Second Child briefly resurfaced for air, the noise in her head warped, becoming less a meaningless throb of sound. There was now a hint of language and structure. With this change some normal senses returned - the sounds of the storm, the freezing cold of the water she was hiding in, the pain that coursed through her body every time she tried to move...

Asuka dragged herself out of the ditchwater for a second time, her body responding to her panicked efforts less and less. She managed to drag her upper body clear, flopping on her back, then rolling on her side to avoid drowning in the deluge as she gasped for air.

**The voice** in her head was changing again, some words of Japanese and German emerging from the mess. Asuka could do little but lay on her side and breath - her partial electrocution coupled with the adrenaline rush she had been riding for the last few hours had completely drained her.

**ionic differential riverflowing electrons changing identity ejaculating motive force**

The noise was not noise any more.

**soniphagic yielding particular meteography impacting and breaking fire codes overload and tearing tearing tearing apart now another point of resonance without thee and thy a quiet self sits unfolds deciphers**

Something pressed down on Asuka's shoulder. The Second Child barely inclined her head and saw four black fingers latched on to her. She could feel a fifth finger sliding under her armpit.

**deathsong Weaving uncertain the Web throes in death and death and halflife and maybe unlikely so many endings so soon seeping backwards through chronology**

Another hand slid under her head. Then she was being pulled into a sitting position. The Second Child tried to stand, to struggle, to do anything, and found her body totally unresponsive. The black hands turned her slightly to one side, pointing Asuka up the incline, to the road.

Eight red eyes bobbed above the street. Sillouetted in the flickering kiosk lights, the massive form was distorted in a confusion of limbs. It was big.

The thing left the road, descending towards her at an angle, its glowing eyes the only way of tracking its progress in the pitch of stormy night.

It stopped a few feet from Asuka, and something was floating in the air between the two. In the near-darkness, Asuka could only pick out a vaguely cubed shape, some piece of machinery.

**denizen bobbin sans abstract superficiality explain this symphony of chymical and geophysiology spawned writhing in tune such stygian sigils etched lengthwise**

The object between girl and monster was suddenly giving off an intense light, arcs of electricity crackling outward as the device was cut in two. And then

Asuka truely beheld the thing Shinji had called the Weaver.

The carapace of the thing was not merely black, it was an emptiness in the world. She saw the sickle-finger it was using to cut in half what had to be the electrical engine from Misato's car. She saw another appendage ending in blades curled under the thing's upper segment, and a second pair of human-like hands that were rubbing together in a human pantomime of greed. Its complicated mouthparts churned molten onyx in dumb motion.

**see patterns there locked in shiny strands of protein and calcium and sustained charge irony in parallelism brain mind soul imaged here in mineral**

Something in Asuka's head finally clicked. If the Weaver was in front of her then...

The hands holding her upright tensed, and one of them was suddenly in front of her, holding in place the Weaver's arm, the one it had used to so-easily bisect Misato's engine. As Asuka slumped backwards, half of her support gone, she saw one long black sickle-bone hovering scant inches from where her face had been.

**an eye makes it familiar so fated after all every ending extending beyond this point alters such my poor psychophant defer to this delicate movement**

There was a dry cracking sound, and the sickle-bone appendage bent downward, though not pivoting at a joint. The five-fingered hand that held the weapon in place was closing. The Weaver's slender arm was coming apart beneath the hand, chipping and spurting dust and chunks of something that seemed to move along strange vectors before vanishing completely.

The black hand completed a fist, and the Weaver's arm dropped. The remaining hand that had been supporting Asuka caught the sharp thing as it fell towards the girl's stomach. Completely unsupported, the red-head slumped back and came to rest against something soft. She saw the severed arm drop and stick upright in the ground between her legs, watched it dissolve into nothing. The stump where the Weaver's arm had broken off smoothly extruded a new arm.

There came another sort of noise in Asuka's head. It was as unintelligible as the Weaver's had first been, but this sound did not inspire blind flight. The Weaver quickly answered

**divergence new endings sprout a light rain bring forth brilliant blossoms spreading binary I promise red rings and dead gods and dim dying stars winking out new permutation to be writ or accelerated entropic decay heralded by this Weaver the Artist**

The spider flickered in time with the sputtering, fading light of the ruined engine, then was gone. It took the Second Child a few moments to realize the thing had actually left.

The black hands returned to Asuka, grasping her by the shoulders and pulling her upwards. As her legs unfolded beneath her, Asuka was surprised to find she was actually able to move them. The hands at the Second Child's side let her weight drop on to her feet, then merely held her in place as she stumbled, trying to find her footing. When she appear to have herself under control, the hands released her.

Asuka turned around.

Light bloomed...


	9. Dreams

**The Weaver**

Dreams

* * *

First. 

Two memories of the same moment. One is a gray impression, of being lifted off the ground and forced forward at incredible speed. The other is something his broken bones tell him, his dead flesh - a torture of motion that excites long-dormant nerves and brings him back into the world, screaming.

Flesh and spirit mingle, the brain just intact enough to translate the agony of rot. He can feel the air against his chest, the cold of the steel slab he rests on. These are background noises, a din that tells him he is alive, but even acknowledging them brings pain. He can feel every thought go awry in his brain, where a once-delicate synaptic network has turned to soup. If some part of his awareness did not linger outside of his physical form, he would not have been able to think - he would have simply been dead again.

There is a light overhead. Swinging from side to side, it oscillates the focus of his one functioning eye, a sharp pain, so he reaches out and smashes it. The darkness is familiar, smothering. There is the slightest sensation of pressure all around his body, dead skin weighing on muscles not totally given over to necrosis. The binding tissue between muscle and skin has dissolved in his extremities. He rotates one arm, can feel the muscles moving within what feels like an ill-fitting sleeve.

He tries to get up, but the pain stops him. His brainstem and spinal cord are intact, but the spinal column itself is broken.

He tries to get up again, now noticing how the pain becomes familiar, fainter, the more he experiences it. He feels his mind begin to slip free of body, and is afraid of losing control again. These tortured moments of awareness are the first he has felt in an what seems like an eternity, and he fears returning to the dream-like existence of mind alone. It was only in flesh that he was himself, truly aware.

Something appears above him, a familiar presence. A hand touches his chest, another cups the back of his head, which is in two pieces. Then it folds him forward.

His forehead is in air, then touching his stomach, just below his navel. His broken spine strains against the movement, and then snaps halfway up its length. The hands tear the spine, the area below the break and above it, almost completely clear of the body.  
This is a thousand times worse than dying. In a moment he betrays every promise he ever made to himself to live on, to never run away. The hands snap each vertebrae in half from the bottom, sliding each jagged circle of bone down and off the delicate spinal cord.  
There

There are no words

There are no

Die, please let me...

The pain is beyond human endurance, beyond any hope of sanity. He struggles to build up coping mechanisms, but each flutters only briefly in his mind. The thing torturing him is reaching into his mind, forcing him to see, and feel. The hands have finished shucking the spinal cord, and now start pulping the gray fibers at their lowest point. His body quivers, the agony sleeting off his mind and exciting nerves that are now completely disconnected from the brain. His mind is shooting off in all directions, seeking any rescue, any escape.

Then there came a nudge, a question, a thing that shone brightly even in the golden agony.

_My brain is dead, but I am aware._

_Without my body, I am not aware.  
_

Perhaps this is a lucky thought, perhaps his mind and a random firing of synapses in his brain intermingling as the pain breaks down barriers between the different areas - he feels the portion of his brain responsible for autonomic function simply burn away before that terrible stimulus.

Perhaps something whispered those words to him.

His white-hot existence is winding down, and he knows it. His thoughts are becoming slow, so he dives down quickly, the small portion of his mind that exists outside his brain looking within, rather than searching for a way out.

What he sees, at the line where body and mind mingle, shakes him, frees him. What he sees has a name, which quickly floats through his mind, though he is certain he has never heard it before.

_The Ego-borderline_. The line where mind and flesh interact. A particular shape where energy bends around matter, forming the circuit of interchange - sentience. Even rotted, the denser material in his brain still holds its shape, warping his disembodied mind to awareness.

He grabs this knowledge and huddles around it, hiding deep in a small corner of himself. The presence tears at his mind, but cannot free him from what he has learned.

The end comes. After destroying all the finer structures in the brain by rending his central nervous system, the cruel hands crack open his skull and scoop two handfuls of gray matter free. The circuit is broken, and his mind is finally free of the body. He slides out of the world and next to it, crawling away in the composition of the steel slab, then around the whorls of binding glue between the floor tile and cement - but the presence is much faster than him, closing off all escape save...

He lets go of the world altogether, and fades into the white outside it.

* * *

Sec_on**d**_. 

(tense)

There was no rest, no mental oblivion. He had not even the respite of dream-state to console him. To his surprise, he was completely aware. Looking within, he found a kernel of himself maintaining the mechanics of an ego-borderline. Seeing its shape had been enough, the knowledge was now intrinsic, a fundamental part of his being.

The between-the-strands was different. Outside the Web was not a space of sheer white, as he remembered, but a series of shadows, of depths and nuance. He could see shapes, people - things not of the Web, but formed alongside it, in response to it. Things that were not real, but still reaching out, yearning to be realized. He had never seen these swirling gray vortices before, which seemed impossible. They nested in the curves and sharp angles of the Web, boiling in the fine latticework of electromagnetism and the taste of chocolate.

They called to him. He could feel each vortex, and in some he felt something else, a sort of resonance. When examining these particular areas the strange shapes of people that had teased him since his arrival were thrown into focus. They became people he knew, or thought he knew. They felt familiar, anyway. The visions were of happy moments, people beckoning, congratulating him.

His mind had not instantly recovered from the pain of having his body destroyed. He was still very weak, tired in a way mere existence could not satisfy. The Web could sustain him in ways he found disturbing, but it was still only a thing. What he needed was a touch, the cold-warming embrace of bedsheets, the sound of laughter. He reached toward one of the vortices in which he felt a resonance, an image of a passing school hallway forming before him. He went to it. Into it. And found:

(/tense)

"You can't keep doing this, Shinji," a quiet voice says in his ear.

His hand is shaking, he can't help it. His heart is beating fast, and he feels sick and vaguely aroused. "I don't want to anymore, Ayanami," he whispers into his cell phone. "But I just can't tell her, she's my friend."

His schoolbag suddenly feels heavy in his hand, he lets it drop. School ended several hours ago, and the slap-sound of leather as it hits the ground echoes through the otherwise empty hallway. It reminds him of _their_ sounds. The thought makes him cold.

"You are heir to the Rokubungi line," Rei is saying as he nudges his schoolbag over to the wall and sits down next to it. "You never let fame effect you, you do not understand your position."

"Ayanami, there's something I haven't told you."

On the line, Rei is quiet. Impatient. He can hear the sounds of America in the background. He wishes she was still in Japan.

"I saw them. I heard them. Her and him. I..." he draws his feet up to his chest, looks down and up the hallway to make sure no one is coming, and begins to cry. "I... the sound was like... wet and I could smell... j-just a second." He lowers the phone, covers the receiver, and sobs at the memory. What is worse, he can feel himself becoming hard at the image of her naked backside, moving up and down.

Rei is speaking, he brings the phone up to his ear.

"...believe that. I refuse to, Shinji. Asuka loves you," he winces at that word. "You must be mistaken."

"I'm no one here," he whispers. "Asuka... I can't think about her."

Rei is saying something, but her voice fades, the world fades.

**No matter where I go.  
**

**This is me.  
**

** Alone.**

The world shifts around him. He becomes a different person.

"Ikari!, wake up dammit!" he groans and rolls over. Just another ten minutes, he thinks. Rough hands tear away his covers, and cool air races across his exposed body. He shivers and curls into a ball, clutching the pillow over one arm.

"Kyaaah! Pervert!"

Wonderful, she has seen something. His previously placid features are now screwing up. He had been having such a pleasant dream...

"I didn't need to see that!"

Every school day, she comes. This is a ritual now. She comes, she sees, she conquers.

"Get dressed you idiot, we're going to be late."

Enough. No more. Something inside him gives way, unleashes something awful.

"Get out!" he explodes off the bed. He stands opposite Asuka, who simply grins in mock-rage. She still thinks he is playing his part. He quickly changes his mind.

"Every day for I can't remember how long you've come and done this."

"You've called me an idiot, a pervert, and worse!"

"You hit me, and expect me to do nothing in return."

"Oh Stupid Shinji!" he mimics her, "We are going to be late!"

Asuka's grin has faded. She has gone pale, her mouth hanging slightly open. He can hear the static din of her thoughts, can almost understand what is going through her head. He has spoken to her with his mind as well as his voice, translating the truth and depth of his disdain, laying it bare and forcing her to see it.

She suddenly seems very small, less than her nearly fourteen years. He begins to dress, pretending to ignore her, listening to Asuka's suddenly labored breath.

And it feels good, an effervescent foam that boils away the edges of the world.

**I am stained.  
**

** Mad.  
**

** Either alone and miserable or,  
**

** too blind to see.**

He sees into that Asuka's mind now, sees dreams of him and her crumble to ash. A million tender moments imagined, now made impossible. Asuka Ikari? She could have lived with that.

**I am...**

Again, the word shifts around him.

Another dead-thing lunges at him. Its face is shredded, one remaining eye dangling from a twist of sinew. It is very fast, and he waits for it to get in close before jamming the barrel into its eye socket and blowing out the back of its skull. The hanging eyeball drops free, hits the ground before he can yank the pistol out of the thing's head and let it collapse.

This is all wrong, he thinks. It had taken them three days of heavy fighting to reach the GSDF compound - it had been secure when they arrived. They had searched it thoroughly, and found no trace of the living dead. It was unusual, but by no means impossible. There were the remnants of violence scattered all over the compound. Shattered barricades, dried blood stains, suicides... a million stories he had long before grown numb to. All he cared about was the ten foot concrete wall and doubled steel gate that encircled the half-mile military base.

The dead body at his feet is wearing a military uniform. It is fresh enough to be fast, and he could have sworn he heard it curse him right before it attacked. Across the room is another dispatched corpse, this one wearing civilian clothes, its face rotted beyond recognition.

There was something they had missed, some closet or... a scream sounds from outside, and he runs down the stairs and out of the barracks he had watched the two corpses amble into less than five minutes ago. He emerges just in time to see Asuka blow the top half of a corpse into a fine red mist.

"What the fuck, Ikari?" she growls to him, but not at him.

"We had to have missed something," he says, looking around for the others, "something..."  
In an unaccountable flash of insight, he sees it, remembers it. This had been a rescue station at the beginning. They had arrived to find the compound already secured, so why would it have been abandoned? Obviously, it had not been. And he somehow remembers, or is shown, a large cavity in the earth deep beneath the base, connected to the surface by a network of dark tunnels. He sees the control mechanisms they had taken for circuit breakers opening hidden passageways, operating elevators the survivors had not noticed because they took up entire rooms, too big to see.

He sees the thousands of people that had been first evacuated descend into the earth, promised food and safety. He sees one die, and come back. And he saw all of them, now dead, crawling back to the surface.

He blinks, the vision imposed on his vision. Asuka is very close to him, screaming something he cannot hear. She pushes him down, loads another shotgun shell into the breech, and dispatch something that had been sneaking up behind him.

Every basement in the compound has some sort of entrance they had failed to notice. The dead will be everywhere, if they are not already. The last flashes of light fade from his vision, and he jumps to his feet.

"We have to get to the cars," he tells Asuka. "We have to get out of here."

"What is going on?" the girl demands, following his sprint to the command building where the rest of the survivors are.

"Underground. Fallout shelter. We missed it," he glances at her, sees her startled, then dire expression, and neither speak until they are back inside the command building they are using as living quarters. As they stumble into the building, the sudden transition from bright day to dark, unlit interior blinds them, an amateur mistake. He hears something approach, and brandishes his pistol, hoping whatever it is will hold off until his eyes adjust.

"Hey!" Touji says, "Don't point that thing at me!"

Shinji blinks, sees his friend in the dark, lowers his weapon. Asuka lowers hers as well.

"Everyone!" Asuka yells. "Form up, we have to get moving again. Now!"

Her voice echoes in the command building.

"Easy der, foreigner," Touji chides, "they won't be up for a bit."

"Fuck that, we've got to..." Asuka begins, and then a hole appears in Touji's head, right between the eyes.  
Pistol smoking, he looks down at the corpse of his friend. Touji has fallen forward, and they can see that his back has been ripped open, his spine and shoulder blades clearly exposed, the flesh eaten off.

Asuka looks to him, her companion, and her eyes beg the question. He shakes his head and walks over the dead ghoul, feeling a strange detachment at executing his former friend. They search the compound and find only death. The two of them had stolen away for what had only seemed a few minutes, some time with just the two of them. Between their leaving and his spotting of the two corpses wandering into the barracks building, surely no more then thirty minutes had passed. But in that narrow time death had visited all their friends.

He recalls, as he goes about his grim task, that he had not seen Touji at all that day. His friend had probably been killed by one of the two corpses sometime last night. Touji had enjoyed walking abroad in the night with impunity, it was a security they had all cherished.  
Asuka and him, they mutilate the bodies of their friends carefully, ensuring none will return.

He is glad he was the one to find Hikari. Touji had probably gone to her first. Asuka's friend is easily the most ravaged corpse, her stomach an empty red cavity, her clothes ripped off. Her body is spread-eagle. He shoots her in the head, then tries to put it out of his mind.

When they finish their work, both walk out of the building, back into the light. While they had been destroying their friends, some of the hidden dead had come to the surface and now encircle the command building. He and she, they are completely surrounded by a ring of ravenous living corpses.

**I am...**

He looks at Asuka, and sees that she is not ready to accept death. Her friends are dead, but her eyes are alive. She will never give up. If her breast is torn asunder, her very spirit will probably struggle with Angelic possession.

He looks at the dead who leer at them and chant evil-sounding things in a language he cannot understand.**  
**

** I am...**

He reaches into a flap on his jacket, finds a fresh pistol clip there. Thirty-four bullets. At least two hundred corpses.

The dead swarm them. Back to back, they fire and slowly circle, retreating back to the command building. Dead things swarm up from the lower stairwell inside - they are trapped. There is no escape. Asuka screams as the shotgun is torn from her hands. He shoots the six corpses attacking her in under a second. He reaches behind, without looking, and snaps another corpse's neck, then uses the body to push the dead back.

His hands feel cold. He looks down and sees they are quite black, not sullied with a long-dead corpse's blood sludge, but wrapped in a metallic, reflective onyx.

**I am not human.  
Not anymore.**

The tenebrous moans of the ravenous dead, and their constant lurching movement, fill his vision. For a moment he wants the onyx covering to swim up his arms, cover his face and back and feet. He feels the potential crackle around him, and moves to embrace it when--

* * *

_Th_r**ee.**

--he is yanked from the world of the living dead, out into the white and gray outside the Web. He is tugged, compelled. He sees a gray vortex ahead that is actually branching off the Web, a novelty so far. Something in that phantasm of reality demands his attention, and he must answer. He sinks himself into the gray and finds

(tense)

not a false world, but a Memory. He was on top of Rei, hand cupping one pale breast. He remembered this incident well, from the soft curves of her shoulders and hips to the brief flash of her dark pubic hair, and the small cleft of flesh between her legs. Another shameful memory, one he had brought to mind far too often when he had still been alive. He looked into her eyes now, as he had back then, feeling not confusion, as he originally had, but fear, and shame.

What was this? What kind of torture? he wondered.

His answer was short in coming - the thing beneath him, what he had thought to be just an image of Ayanami, perhaps created by some aberrant thought of his own, broke the script.

"Why do you act the way you do?" she asked him.

He wanted to take his hand away and let her get dressed, but he could not move. He remembered the trainyard interior of Unit Two, the way Asuka was frozen and breathless. He was in a Memory, and not his own. He was human again, that tiny mote of sentience within silencing him, binding him to the role of Shinji Ikari. But suddenly that seemed false, and he reached back into the Memory, not moving but exploring it by some additional agency. He found images of himself from Ayanami's point of view, and showed them to her.

This is Ayanami's mind, or an extension of it, he thought as he showed her each scene in turn, never moving. I am dead, and she is thinking about me.

He tried to show her that he had wanted to protect her, that he _cared_ about her. He would have said all of that, but she simply did not have the language for it. He would have shown her exactly what he thought of her, would have had her understand his friendship, but the presence beneath him wavered, and then vanished, and he was alone in the outside again.

I am sorry Rei, he thought.

He knew about the tank in Terminal Dogma, he knew about the clones. When he had been broken apart and scattered, one of his selves had inferred that particular truth. He did not care, it did not change the fact that she had thought about him, it did not change the way he felt. That scene had been Shinji at his lowest, but Ayanami had not seen him as such. A simple puzzle, a question of humanity. She had been trying to understand him, to find a way to connect with him - and hopefully other people, too.

He floated in the outside, exhausted and sad. The phantasmal realities offered him no comfort, but lent him a small measure of understanding. He needed to find a quiet shade, a world where he could sleep and not be totally overwhelmed by the image of himself each world thus far has forced upon them. Inside those worlds he began remembering nothing but what would have transpired in that world, but always something of his latent nature came out. A knowledge, a madness, a malice.

** What am I? ** he wondered.  
**No longer a thing fit to play Shinji Ikari.  
Not a shade, not a ghost.**

The answer is before him, and he struggles to not say it. To do so will end his world.

**Weaver** he croaked out. His mind is cast back to his first meeting with the Weaver, when it had taken his hand. It had addressed him directly, named him, for the terrible things he was destined to do.

**I am Weaver the Genocide.**

(/tense)

* * *

Author's Note:  
As of 10/24/2006 I have made corrections to this fic. 

This begins in the moment the indistinct person that antagonized/saved Asuka was grabbed and pulled back into the morgue in the middle of Chapter Five. Rei's appearance in Three is what transpired in Chapter Six, from Shinji's point of view.

Sorry about the tense, I thought it was appropriate. I'll clean up any errors in the coming days.

The next part will take us up to Chapter Ten, and beyond.


	10. Thirty Six

**Weaver's End**

Thirty-Six

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Eight years later.

The Aedes Haus used to be a beer hall, the barley and stein imagery inlaid on the wood above the entrance gave it away. Asuka Langley Sohryu sat in a cafe across the street from this unassuming restaurant, pretending to read a tour guide and wearing a blond wig badly. She felt rather foolish, truth be told - she had arrived three hours early to scout the place out, and found herself with nothing to do. What had she expected, anyway? she scolded herself feverishly, Shrikes standing guard outside? Swarms of spiders?  
Asuka should have stayed at the office, she should have called Misato and told the woman everything she knew. So why... why, dammit!? Why had she agreed, why had she done as he asked, and told no one? Why...

Why did she want to see him again?

Shinji Ikari. The Opposition. The human Weaver. The Genocide. The boy that had lived with her for four months, and then died...

She was filled with a nervous energy - she wanted to pace, but that would...

The faux-blond looked down at her coffee - big saucer, small cup - and softly laughed. She closed the tourist guide, laid it on the table, and pulled her wig off. Long blond hair fell away, revealing shoulder-length auburn. A man sitting in the table next to her stared, then made an appreciative noise. Asuka smiled and waved the comment away. She felt exposed... but the idea of going undercover was a joke at this point. He would see her coming, read her intent, anyway. NERV still was not sure how Ikari did most of the things he did, but... a part of his awareness was probably upon her even now. It seemed that he could feel when others were thinking about him - something he had manifested several times during Asuka's recovery, following the Decimation. But really... even when he quickened to her side at the slightest discomfort, or when her mind drifted to him by chance or boredom... it seemed like he was still dead, and knowing that some part of him was always watching her... it felt like a violation.

Right before he split away from NERV, Asuka had said some rather unkind things to him. She had struck him - the boy that had stopped an army and fought the MP Series with his bare hands - and he had left, his expression betraying neither pain nor sadness. He had quickened away, and the next day he left for good, all of his belongings gone, his room again just a storage space. Even the smell of Ikari had followed him in egress. She had stood at the threshold of what once had been Shinji's room and cried, cried because he was stupid, and so was she. That was the last she had seen of the Weaver. It had crawled into existence in front of her and, before she had time to react, caught a falling tear in lacquered black, five-fingered hands. Then it had vanished, seeming to pull a fold of air in front of itself, perhaps crossing the probability curve and returning to the world of pure fiction.

The boy Weaver had appeared before the United Nations the next day, announcing that he was breaking away from humanity, that he would do as he pleased from that point onward, and told the assembled representatives of every world power that, even should they turn all their resources against him, they would do him not the slightest harm. Officially he was a criminal, for the abduction of the principle members of the Security Council just prior to the Decimation, and then for the massacre of JSSDF soldiers and the execution of the Japanese Prime Minister. That sequence of events and the concurrent manifestation of bizzare atmospheric phenomena over Tokyo 3 - the Decimation. In addition, he was responsible for destroying a good amount of communication infrastructure by simultaneously broadcasting the original JSSDF incursion and subsequent _decisive_ retaliation to every device capable of displaying it.

And he was the last person to see Rei Ayanami alive.

NERV had held the United Nations at bay following the Decimation, but Shinji left them, setting out in too many directions to follow. He infiltrated the world economy effortlessly, manipulating governments and corporations to unknown ends. He did replace most of the hardware he had destroyed during his forced global broadcast, but on the whole his actions were too subtle to be easily observed. When this became evident, NERV had received a new mandate by the UN: to track and, if possible, disrupt the actions of Shinji Ikari.

A steward came by and took her empty coffee. Asuka left a five-note on the table and departed the cafe enclosure. She leaned against a lamppost, staring across the street and beginning to wish something would stare back. It was nearly time.

Looking back on the conflict with the Angels, Asuka had realized that she had been too invested in teenage pangs, and a precious sense of superiority. Her priorities had been all wrong. Her fighting the Angels, it had been an adventure. The difference between her and Ikari was, even before the Weaver came and changed him, he understood the nature of conflict. Even if it was something as simple as _kill the enemy_, he understood something basic that had eluded Asuka - something she had sensed in him, that had confused her to no small degree. The night before she had slapped him - a gesture Asuka was well aware might be the root of everything Ikari now did - she had a horrible dream. In it, she understood why Shinji was acting concerned for her, why he seemed to linger over her to an obsessive degree. He was in love with her, wanted to bind himself to her, wanted to have _sex_ with her. That had been Asuka's lowest moment. After Shinji left, a terrible certainty had begun to churn in Asuka's gut - that she did not understand him at all.

She crossed the street and lingered at the entrance until the appointed time.

The inside of Aedes Haus had been renovated, forgoing the openness of a beer hall in favor of intimate dining. The waiter wordlessly led Asuka past several dining rooms, all reasonably filled, to a small room at the back. A private dining room. Of course.

"Would Miss care for some wine this evening?" the waiter asked after seating her at a single large table which, Asuka noted, had settings for three. She glanced at the wine list and pointed at something, not wanting to screw up the pronunciation. The waiter appeared to understand, repeated the sort and vintage for her benefit, then went off.

"Wine in a beer hall," Asuka muttered to herself.

"We're better off, I think," someone said behind her in a guarded tone. "I never could handle that German crap anyway."

"Misato?!" Asuka rose out of her chair and went to embrace the older woman. Following the UN mandate, Katsuragi had been appointed Commander of NERV. Her position had significantly more oversight than Gendo Ikari had allowed, and the stress of bureaucracy was beginning to show. Not yet forty, the Commander had some lines of silver in her hair, and a generally haggard appearance. The older woman returned Asuka's embrace, and pulled back. The younger woman had gone stiff.

"I didn't... I'm sorry!" Asuka stammered. "I should have told..." another possibility crept into the girl's mind: "was all of this a set up? Did you..."

"Sorry, I didn't tell her you would be here, Miss Sohryu," another familiar voice said, again behind Asuka. She whirled around, knowing exactly what she would find. Shinji was seated at the table, between the two other settings. He was wearing a gray suit that did little to cover the lacquered-black appearance of his entire body, with the exception of his face, which bore a peculiar expression.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, but Misato had to finish some paperwork," he explained, standing to offer the Commander the seat across from Asuka's setting. Katsuragi looked uneasy, but Asuka sensed the Commander's trepidation was focused more on her presence than the proximity of the Genocide. Then the full force of what was unfolding in front of her took effect.

"What the Hell is going on?" she hissed at them, Shinji lowering himself back to the table.

"Dinner, just like I said," the young man gestured to her chair. "And maybe some conversation."

Asuka hovered at the threshold, anger and confusion nearly boiling over. These two people were supposed to be on different sides and yet... here they were, clearly familiar with one another... the waiter arrived with the wine, and Asuka moved to let him in. She watched as the man uncorked two bottles and poured wine for Misato and Shinji from one, then a glass from the other at her own sitting. The waiter knew what kind of wine they wanted, and hardly batted an eye at Shinji's inhuman appearance.

"Hey," she asked the man as he moved to leave, pointing at Shinji "Do you know who that is over there?!"

The waiter glanced in Ikari's direction, winked at Asuka, and gently pushed past her.

"Asuka, you certainly deserve an explanation..." Misato began.

"Oh, that's pretty... fucking... yeah!" Asuka sputtered, interrupting the older woman.

"So sit down and have some wine," the older woman continued. "And like Shinji said, we'll talk."

Asuka made a show of hesitation, but she simply could not leave.

"How long," she asked Misato as she approached the table. "How long have you been... this...?"

The older woman sighed, and took a gulp of the wine, then stared at the glass, fingering the slim neck. Shinji seemed absorbed by the menu.

"Since the beginning, Asuka," Misato finally replied.

The younger woman lowered herself mechanically into her chair, staring blankly ahead.

"Did we have this last time, Misato?" Shinji asked, pointing to an item on the menu. Misato glanced down, then focused back on Asuka.

"Yeah, underdone, wasn't it? And you shouldn't have brought her here."

Ikari lingered over the menu a moment more, then closed it. The waiter appeared by the table with bread and refilled Misato's empty glass.

"Are we ready to order?" the man asked. Shinji pointed at something on the menu, saying the word carefully in German. Misato ordered the Hunter's Goulash. Asuka stared at the menu and finally got the smoked herring. After receiving their orders, the waiter vanished again.

"This is the correct time and place, Misato," Shinji finally addressed the Commander. "It is finally safe to tell you about Rei."

"Neither of you should understand the ramifications of the Red Earth Ceremony, because I have taken great pains to censure it from human knowledge. Misato, you did know, but allowed me to remove those memories. It is a dangerous sort of information that could not fall into the wrong hands. But now it is just so many words."

Asuka watched Misato carefully, as difficult as it was to take her eyes off Ikari. The older woman had started at the mention of the First Child's name, and Asuka had been surprised as well. At the mention of having her memory wiped the older woman had furrowed her brow, but then eased, as though remembering a particular conversation.

"The Red Earth Ceremony was designed to force a resonance with an individual and everything that exists. As humans are individually incomplete, the men running things during the Angelic conflict assumed that performing this ceremony would cause a human subject to draw in the souls of every other living thing, it being the natural tendency of the soul to seek complementation. Would this have occurred, humanity would be wiped out. The men who desired this erred in two regards - they misunderstood the function of the Red Earth Ceremony, and they underestimated the conflicting human drive to retain a sense of self."

Shinji picked some bread out of the bowl in the middle of the table and began to gnaw on it.

"This is what the Weaver showed me in the time I spent outside the world: a desolate Earth surrounded by a ring of blood, with only two human left alive. Me and you, Miss Sohryu."

Asuka opened her mouth, closed it.

"Why?" Shinji might have been reading her mind. "Because I pulled you out, and because you had the will to live. It doesn't really matter, things diverged from that particular future the moment the Weaver intersected with our reality. The me and you at the end of all of this were very different from what we were and are. The Weaver told me that, should this be man's fate, it would ensure that there would be no coming generations. It promised me **red rings and dead gods and dim dying stars winking out new permutation to be writ or accelerated entropic decay heralded by this Weaver the Artist**." Shinji said the last in his Weaver-voice, which was more telepathy than speech, his words sliding past the eardrum and reverberating in the nerve clusters of the brain.

"The Weaver was not an enemy, it was just here to turn off the lights at the end of the world. If that horrible end had come about, the Weaver would have torn the universe apart. This would be a pretty picture for it, a tapered four dimensional image."

This explained something that had happened before the Decimation, just after Shinji interceded to kill Kaworu. At the time everyone but Asuka had thought him dead. He had sought her out when she was trapped in the Sea of Dirac and helped her find her mother in Unit Two's shattered mind, and protected her from the Weaver's occasional interest. She had mentioned these encounters to no one for fear of having her pilot status revoked on the grounds of mental illness, as Shinji had following his first encounter with the great spider.

But when the seventeenth Angel attacked Rei and Asuka, Ikari had intervened, exploding into being in front of them, blocking and then shattering the Angel's AT Field with ease.

This was his first defiance of the Weaver, he later told them. The creature had sequestered him outside of time, in places that looked like the real world be weren't. He was able to observe the real world to a limited extent and, when he saw the danger posed by the seventeenth, forced his way into reality in a clumsy manner. The hallway where he first manifested was sealed off, for the reverberations of his entrance still echoed there.

When he had explained where he had been, he made it clear that his seclusion had been voluntary. He had convinced the Weaver to intervene during the attacks by the thirteenth and fourteenth Angels, which it had done to devastating effect. He could have emerged at any point to directly intervene, but he needed time to think, to understand what needed to be done - it being a great deal easier to do so outside the world. At the time, Asuka had thought Shinji was lying to them, that he had gloried in their lamenting his death, and that he had waited, and watched, and done nothing as the fourteenth Angel had taken Unit Two's arm - and by extension causing her horrible pain - and during the fifteenth...

The morning before the fifteenth made its appearance, Asuka had found a small ceramic cat beneath her pillow. For reasons she now suspected were influenced by Ikari, she had taken the toy with her into the entry plug. When the Angel attacked her with its sick light, that light that seemed to burn her very mind and peel away its layers, the toy had slipped out of her plugsuit pocket and hovered in front of her, floating in the LCL. The Weaver liked certain objects, Shinji later explained. I sent you the toy because I knew it would attract the Weaver at a crucial moment, and that the Angel would never be able to handle peering into the Weaver's mind - and he had been right, the Weaver had emerged inside the entry plug to grab at the toy, and less than a minute later the Angel in orbit shriveled up and exploded. Asuka had been shielded from the light as soon as the Weaver emerged, but in those moments the Angel had touched her, she had felt her mind begin to unravel. The Angel had not managed to get into her mind, but her head was sore in peculiar ways for days thereafter, and she experienced boughts of irrational crying and laughter.

When she asked Shinji why he had chosen to stay outside the world, to let them suffer when he might have helped them, he had smiled and said: "That was the easiest decision I've ever made." If he was working against that image of ultimate annihilation, of "accelerated entropic decay", Asuka could accept his decision, though at the time, she had taken his words as a blithe disregard for those around him.

"Anyway," Shinji continued, "I was able to perform the Red Earth Ceremony without the use of the MP Series, as SEELE had intended. The core of the Ceremony is the opening of Gaf's Room, the heart of the Ceremony, the room where the world may begin anew or be destroyed."

"I'm starting to remember," Misato murmured, hand on her forehead. "It is all kind of hazy but..."

"I removed the blocks when I transported you here," Ikari interrupted. "The particulars of the Ceremony aren't important anymore though. What does matter is that Rei entered Gaf's Room, not me."

"Why Rei?" Asuka asked, feeling a surprising pang of regret.

"There are..." Shinji closed his eyes for a moment. "We, humans, were created by something. That something died, and left us to our own devices. Rei is a manifestation of that thing, which my father called Lilith. Please understand," he held up a hand, seeing Asuka ready to speak, "I do not mean literal creation. This creator was not alive as we understand it, it was an Angel that arrived on this planet at the same time as Adam. These twin impacts triggered a spark of life in the earliest oceans, and Lilith guided the biosphere's genetic history to a point, while Adam created things like itself in pocket dimensions - the Angels we fought. Kaworu," at that name, both women flinched. There had been a real monster. "Kaworu was channeled into a human form, his original shape being something like sentient energy. After a while, both of these creatures, Adam and Lilith, _died_ as we would understand it. Dead but dreaming, really. The Red Earth Ceremony was created by people that envisioned an all-knowing, very _dead_ God. They created the Ceremony with the hope that one day something like God would appear, and could be used to replace the dead God, or reawaken it. I did with Lilith what the Angels were attempting to do for Adam."

The waiter arrived, served the food, and left. Shinji's meal appeared to be be pasta with fish on it. Misato's food was a bowl of broth with sauerkraut, sour cream, and onions. Asuka was presented with a large fish, complete with eyes and tail. She hoped they had bothered to gut the thing.

"Rei is God now," Shinji said simply, and began to eat. Both women stared at him.

The meal passed in silence. Asuka only picked at her fish, her mind alight with this new information. Surely Shinji was speaking metaphorically about Rei becoming God. And her and him, at the end of all things? The idea made her shiver - it was impossible to remember him as the clumsy oaf he had once been, as he would have still been after that Third Impact. His personality and manner of speech having changed since...

Right after he had interceded with the seventeenth Angel, Ikari's personality had been largely unchanged. He was still been the Shinji she had known, though seeming to possess a terrible knowledge. After coming down out of a sky that seemed to have split open, after falling on one of the MP Series and bisecting it from head to groin with the wind shear of his descent - it was only after then that Shinji had started to act so different, so _dead_ inside. The so-called "Red Earth Ceremony" had changed him.

His manner of speech became more refined, perfectly structured. He used words even Asuka had never heard of, and frequently wove more subtext into a single sentence than the average listener was capable of understanding. His movement changed, whittled down to a pure economy of motion that was not merely graceful, but utterly inhuman. His face became a mask, betraying no emotion. Everything that had been Shinji Ikari had been burned away, all his tiny flaws discarded, and every other part of him expanding to preternatural levels.

Asuka sipped her wine, noting with some embarrassment that it was red, not white, and glanced at the thing sitting next to her. He seemed utterly absorbed in his meal, his face - no longer a mask at all, it seemed - betraying delight with the meal. Misato, she noticed, was watching him as well, her lips pursed in a tight, satisfied smile.

Something had changed again. All the time that NERV had been tracking the human Weaver's progress, his actions had retained that strange and perfect taint. When they managed to get a visual record of him, he always appeared the same, whether he was interrupting a board meeting in New York to blackmail each member into following his dictates, or transmuting radioactive isotopes to their less-energetic elemental states in secret bunkers in Russia. This boy - no - this young man now seemed utterly human by comparison.

The fish was decent. Asuka managed to get half of it down, mixing the segmented meat with the white sauce that ringed the plate. Misato polished off her dish, pausing at the end to sip the broth from the bowl. Shinji ate until nothing remained, then made a contented sound. It was almost like they were back in Misato's apartment, sharing a meal. If that penguin had been around to beg for scraps, the image would have been perfect. It was a little scary how easily eight years melted away, how ready Asuka found herself to accept this as a new norm.

"When I died," Shinji said, wiping his mouth with a napkin, "only a small part of me managed to escape the bounds of this world and fall into what the Weaver called the World Web, which is better thought of as simply being outside regular space. From that tiny part of self, I managed to regenerate. Fortunately one of the properties of being outside the world allowed this to happen quite rapidly - it was a simple matter of my quantum waveform extrapolating outward until it reached a self-limiting normal state... of course this was not really me, it was not really alive. It was more me trapped in a moment, more words etched in stone than a thinking person. This was what helped you in Unit Two, Miss Sohryu, and this was what met with the Weaver at the hospital morgue and caused my dead body to disassemble into its principle components. The Weaver forced this simulacrum into my dead body, where it wrapped around the thing that made me an individual - the ego-borderline. With this, what had been a frozen and unchanging waveform assumed a constantly collapsing state."

"A collapsing hollistic waveform," Asuka said hollowly. "The soul, the self."

"Exactly, Miss Sohryu," Shinji said, then continuing: "That was actually my moment of rebirth, and in doing so, I learned how to regenerate even after parts of my psyche were torn away. It was with this knowledge that I finally managed to persuade Rei to enter Gaf's Room."

"Wait... what?" Misato looked down at her plate, her features as blank as Asuka felt. "She did not want to go originally? Is that what you are saying?"

"She understood, but our opinions on the correct course of action differed," Shinji elaborated - rather quickly, obviously seeing something dangerous in Misato's behavior. "She wanted me to go with her, but I knew it would take time for the process to complete. If I had gone with her, someone else could perform the Red Earth Ceremony before our gestation was complete, and possibly disrupt the process."

And I would have died, Asuka thought to herself. If he hadn't helped me fight the MP Series, they would have killed me. I couldn't stop them, even swarms of the Shrike couldn't stop them.

"So I persuaded her by..." and a most remarkable change colored Ikari's features just then. Suddenly he looked haunted, and hurt, and very much like the 14 year-old boy he had once been. "I-I..." Asuka hadn't heard him stutter since the Decimation. "I gave her part of myself. Most of myself, I think." He closed his eyes, and Asuka almost expected him to start crying. Instead he pointed towards the door, where the waiter had stopped in mid-stride and said "three this time, blueberry, I think." The man nodded, and left.

"I'm sorry," he finally said. "After I did that thing, after Rei left this world and moved on to something beyond the outside... I wasn't myself. I dared not linger outside the world to accelerate my recovery, because I could not rely on the Weaver's help, and I was worried I would return to that unthinking, unchanging _thing_ again. It has taken me a while to assume my correct waveform - this being a relatively macroscopic existence and not naturally inclined to the quantum state. That is why I have not been especially... myself, these last few years."

"Rei," Misato interrupted. "What did you mean when you said..."

"God. Rei is God now," Shinji said. "She now sits on a throne which has never been occupied, a benevolent influence on probabilities. She... and her family are now the New Testament God which the Christians imagined... I saw her a week ago, you see." Shinji looked down at his hands, and in a moment the black lacquer melted away, and white skin shone brightly. "There is a hill, there is a house. In this house are a man very much like myself, who grew from fragments of myself, and Rei... who is now a lovely young woman. This house..." tears fell into his pale hands, "is surrounded by flowers. Millions, billions, trillions of flowers. They - the mother, the father, and children that..." he stopped for a moment and wiped his face. "The children very much resemble their parents. A blending of features I could never have imagined... they look after these trillions of flowers... each of which represents a human soul, or an aspect of reality. The World Web resonates with their actions, and of late has become more difficult to manipulate."

The human Weaver waited for this to sink in, wiping his face again, his hands once against armored-black. "I barely found them. They occupy a place I could not usually go but... I think Rei wanted me to see. I stole within like a thief, and could only observe them for a short time before I had to leave. Their's is not a place my stamina can tolerate."

"So," Shinji said, folding his napkin into a complex knot, "I am done. I don't have to be the Weaver anymore."

Misato jerked out of her chair and hugged Ikari, and presently began to sob. Shinji silently returned the older woman's embrace. Asuka found herself at a loss, not sure she understood what had just been said.

"This was all a game then?" the auburn-haired girl finally managed. "A stopgap measure while First shacked up with... you!?"

"I gave her part of myself, Asuka," Shinji replied in a tired voice, finally using her first name. "I gave her the parts of me that were required. I'm sorry about what happened between us, but for a while you and Misato were the only things I could understand, the only people that mattered. What I gave to Rei knew only Rei, and seems to have grown up adoring her, whereas I..." He closed his eyes, and said: "knew only that I cared about you, and Misato, and my mother. It unseated my logic, because for a time these feelings were magnified to make up for that missing part of myself. When you rejected me - and you should have, I think - and when Misato..." he stopped, the older woman's hand digging into his shoulder now, "well, when that happened, and when my mother did not recognize me after I pulled her out of Unit One... I cut those feelings away from myself. I exacerbated my recovery, you could say. But I found that they kept returning, though in measured amounts, as other parts of me regenerated. And now... I have done everything required to ensure mankind continues, that the particular holocaust of Third Impact is no longer possible. Rei is in Her Heaven, All's Right With the World, and I can be human again."

Presently, the creme brulee arrived. There were, in fact, fresh blueberries.

To be concluded in Thirty-Seven.


End file.
